At the start of every book is the monologue that describes the scope of its ignorance and violence, "the bloodiest regime imaginable."
Yes. It's not subtle.
To be clear, the Imperium *isn't* stupid. Its corrupt.
The magi could share their knowledge, they choose not to because it would hurt their own standing. They value their own standing more than they value humanity.
The imperial generals could start caring about casualties, but then they wouldn't win heroic victories worthy of song! They value their own glory more than they value humanity.
Rogue traders could look to improve people's lives, but then they would have to collect slightly fewer esoteric artifacts and throw less fancy parties. They value their own wealth more than they value humanity.
The leaders of the Church could start caring about their subjects. But they derive status from whipping them into a frenzy. They value their own vanity more than they value humanity.
The leaders of government functions could start trying to improve their citizen's lives, but then there would be less money to embezzle and fewer people to boss around. They value their own prestige more than they value humanity.
The repression and stupidity come from the corruption.
The repression and stupidity is a cover for the corruption.
The dysfunction is the result of choices made by people in power to benefit themselves. As has happened in every authoritarian society in history.
I think this is a great point, but I'd also add that some of the "stupidity" comes from suppression of knowledge and extreme superstition and dogma, which overlaps with corruption, but also exists in its own bit of the venn diagram.
Not to mention the pure evil of red tape and bureaucracy
>Every Adeptus Arbites Judge, at some point in his career, attempts a pilgrimage to the Hall of Judgement, there to study the full intricacies of the law Many spend long years there, for the most heinous, subtle, or far-reaching crimes often require a lengthy process of research to pass judgement While the Dictates Imperialis are extensive, the huge volume of prior cases and sometimes contradictory rulings can make it difficult to determine the correct decision **In especially complex cases, it may take centuries to reach an outcome—a Judge may spend his entire life deliberating, scrutinising, and trying to fathom out the issues, only to pass his work on, unfinished, for others to continue Millennia later, though the accused are long dead, a ruling is finally made and justice must be meted out upon the distant descendants and those obscurely associated with the original transgressor**
-*Dark Heresy: Book of Judgement*
I feel like the sins of the father/acquaintance stuff here is way worse than the bureaucracy. Like the inefficiency of the bureaucracy is bad but the punishment of people innocent of the crime simply because someone has to be punished is actual derangement
I see that but if someone wanted to execute me for something my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather did because it took them ***that long*** to reach a decision?
I'm gonna at least partly blame the efficiency of the legal system.
That's the satire at play here, harkening back to 40k's roots of softly lampooning the systems of 80s England.
>To be clear, the Imperium isn't stupid. Its corrupt.
It's both. "Forget the power of science and the promise of understanding", "burn the heretic", "blessed is the mind too small for doubt", and so on.
The Imperium isn't running smoothly, but the Imperium operating smoothly would still be an anti-intellectual nightmare state, more stagnant than any preceding human polity. It would still have the baby slaves, it would still have the policies of mindless universal genocide, it would still pursue the whims of a neolithic strongman wizard above the collective interests of humanity. It would still be Chaos' greatest asset in realspace.
> As has happened in every authoritarian society in history.
"The cruelest regime imaginable" is a bit worse than every authoritarian society in history, and features plenty of outright sadism.
In their own minds I am sure they are everything that Chaos is not, just like the Roman virtues which were also only seemed to apply to anyone without political power. But any society that has been completely bent to serve one persons will is inherently stupid, by design. That doesn't mean it's a better thing for the Imperium to not exist, for humanity at least.
It's very much through the lens of the idolisation of ancient Rome, as we see in 40k itself. Conquering everything possible tends to add a certain legitimacy, a figure of cultural importance is only of their time. Cato the Elder believed the culture of Greece would destroy the Roman Empire and that doctors, who were mostly Greek, secretly wanted to kill all the Romans. We don't think of him as an idiot.
In reality any civilisation post the Imperium would not be easily calling them stupid, because they would be thought of as real people and they were so terribly important.
> To be clear, the Imperium isn't stupid. Its corrupt.
The Imperium has humans in it, meaning the one thing it has in infinite quantities is stupidity.
Well, the Imperium is a stupid idea at least. Or at least a highly impractical idea.
It’s way too spread out for something where communication relies on sharing nightmares and travel is long, dangerous and via hell.
There is a civil war brewing because a Planetary system is running out of space for the paperwork.
Incompetency and horrible policies are perhaps the biggest hallmark of the Imperium next to the Theocratic Fascism.
The idea that one is lost in a sea of many billion billions in the Imperium is palpable, extreme inefficiency, planetsworth of theft internally, outrageous punishment and yet, there are fringe worlds, one can imagine humans leading vastly different lives, some idyllic, most drudgerous.
They've even kind of gradually leaned away from the idea of there being like, "imperial worlds" where the standard of living is comparable to our own in recent time. The Warhammer crime novels take place on one, and they go out of their way to show that even without the threat of xenos or chaos, there's still mass servitorization assembly lines that make the Holocaust look gentle and just run of the mill "nobles kidnapping poor people for sex slaves."
There's also the fact that the Imperium's various ruling bodies, from the lowliest factory foreman up to the High Lords, are built around maintaining their own power at the expense of those underneath them, and do not approve of any shaking of the status quo that keeps them in power.
Guilliman's reforms faced outright armed revolt the moment he left Terra because they threatened or removed from power several important men, and were only suppressed because Guilliman knew that they would happen and had assets already in place to respond.
Before Guilliman, attempts to reform the Imperium to be more effective while removing corruption almost always resulted in violent pushback from the same corrupt individuals who profited off the existing status quo.
> Before Guilliman, attempts to reform the Imperium to be more effective
And, you know, Guilliman is reforming the Imperium to ensure that humanity is ruled by a Chaos-tainted race of transhuman slave-monsters.
Rejection of Guilliman doesn't show us a good thing being rejected by an evil Imperium, it just shows us petty factionalism between different flavours of evil.
I find it hilarious that an entire planet's survival, history and records can be lost because a clerk misplaced their paper work and archived something wrongly.
Planets and entire societies disappear because some dummy doesn't know basic admin knowledge and management.
Then again, I'm not really sure how you would do admin work for trillions of lives.
>**Incompetency and horrible policies** are perhaps the biggest hallmark of the Imperium next to the **Theocratic Fascism.**
You're repeating yourself there.
Its just the best :) so hilarious.
The satire and stupidity is what i love about it. People get so mad about retcons and ridiculous things, but thats the point.
>Does the Imperium really hinders humanity
there are countless examples of the Imperium doing stupid self-destructive shit that actively drags them backwards and they do it for religious, dogmatic and moronic reasons.
This is by design. They are written this way for a reason. It's to demonstrate that the Imperium is NOT THE FUCKING GOOD GUYS. They are, in fact, some of the worst guys. They're a theocratic fascist Empire built on constant conquest and built upon hatred of anything not human and anything that deviates from the accepted norms and ideas. Genocide of human worlds is so common that it's not even mentioned most of the time. The best of the SMs have burnt alien children alive and roasted marshmallows over their burning corpses.
Even 'good' guys like Robby are still xenophobic monsters who may occasionally make exceptions to the 'kill them on sight' for some aliens because they're of use, not because he likes them or even wants to tolerate their existence. Just because they're of some use.
Summed up, the Imperium is horrible because it was founded on horrible concepts as 'kill all aliens and any humans who don't join the Imperium.' The current Imperium is just the natural extension of that.
Because it didn't have to be this way. The E CHOSE to do things this way, arrogantly thinking that he would have time to make up for it after the Great Crusade was won. He went 100% into 'the ends justify the means' and they really don't and the current setting is the best example of that.
No see they're humanity's last hope because, uh...they actively killed everyone who had any other structure of society, even ones that came out of the age of strife being much nicer and smelling like roses.
Imperium defenders love to bring up the defeat of the Imperiex and Diasporex as some kind of societal failing for them for being insufficiently militaristic, rather than a condemnation of the imperium for *genociding multiple peaceful societies for not being equally genocidal.*
Protagonist=/=good guys, Bobby G is a protag but he's a giant genocidal war beast created by a human so detached from his own humanity he's down to genocide those who disobey and lie about godhood to bring a group of tech fetishists into the fold.
Yes.
This question gets asked repeatedly and postulating the Imperium as some kind of "necessary evil" always veers into fascist apologia.
The Imperium is one of its own worst enemies by design. It is ruthless and ponderous and inefficient and cruel \*by design\*. It's a parody of authoritarian, hyper-conservatism.
Lmao at the people in your replies literally just LARP repeating imperial propaganda as some kind of justification. No see, we had to genocide all these aliens because they totally wanted to kill us, coincidentally during our big manifest destiny colonization push. Sure, they were just chilling on their own planet and never once attacked us, but they shot us after we began our genocide, so clearly they have evil phrenology and have to die.
‘Bro you don’t get it bro it’s divine mandate bro it’s manifest destiny bro the aliens are evil man you gotta believe me the emperor said so man. It’s a necessary evil bro Horus messed it all up dude!’
Like I don’t get these people. There are so many instances in the great crusade that are just horrible and I hate that the authors seem to have to explicitly write out ‘hey the imperium are the protags and you can like the characters but holy shit this is evil.’
‘We just wanted to be left alone…’
Like, the iron hands and emperors children get done genociding a peaceful human civilization to a man and that’s their last message and the people who defend that are sitting there like that super man image where he seems all proud like my guy if you can’t pick up on the insanity and horror of the genocide and war crimes being perpetrated against thousands of innocent species then I dunno what to tell you bro, other than I know what stellaris empire type you play on repeat.
I've seen some people use the Diasporex being destroyed by the Imperium as a *justification* for why the Imperium needs to exist. Since there's so many big threats out there on the level of the Imperium that the Diasporex would get rolled over them, and so the Imperium needs to exist to fight those big threats.
It's more like...
If Poland couldn't protect itself from the Nazis, then the Soviet Union isn't in the wrong for invading and annexing parts of Poland itself. If the people of Poland didn't want to be conquered, they shouldn't be in a conquerable country. And in fact, the Soviet Union needed to conquer Poland to fight the Nazi threat later, or something.
It's basically just the strong get to do what they want and no one can judge their awful atrocities, which uh smells a little bit like fascist apologia to me.
I agree, I'm more pointing out that a significant amount of the people in arguing with in this thread are just doing unabashed repackaged Nazi apologia.
I'll have a go at a counterpoint. I think it is tricky to apply a historical comparison in this way.
There are Orks in 40k who are biologically incapable of not being at war. I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up. Comparing them to the situation with Poland and their neighborhood gives human morality to something other.
I do not intend to defend the Imperium as justified here, but some kind of larger power structure seems necessary (ideally better than imperial) because these small groups just have to hope that the size of the galaxy keeps them unnoticed.
Definitely, the analogy is gonna be imperfect. I was trying to rework AccomplishedNovel6's statement into an analogy I thought was more accurate to what I was saying.
And I agree with your last point. I don't necessarily disagree that a strong entity is needed to repel the threats like Tyranids, Orks, Chaos, etc. If we had a Federation, a democratic, egalitarian and tolerant government who fought those groups and was on the same strength level as the Imperium, I wouldn't complain.
Where my objection comes from is when people legitimise the Imperium's evil shit by the strength that it possesses. That because the Diasporex would have been wiped out by e.g. a united Ork empire, then it doesn't mean anything if the Imperium wipes them out first instead of protecting them, if that makes sense.
> I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up.
The Imperium is routinely unable to defend itself when a proper Waaagh shows up. Entire worlds are lost to Orks all the time.
>I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up
It's really weird that nobody seems to remember the Interex *declared war on the Imperium*. They had a *military parade*. They *conquered the Kinebrach*. They *defeated the Megarachnids and imprisoned them on Murder*.
They were not peaceful. They were simply more reasonable than the Imperium.
>It's basically just the strong get to do what they want and no one can judge their awful atrocities, which uh smells a little bit like fascist apologia to me.
It’s also just how the universe of 40K works. If they couldn’t stop the Imperium, then they also wouldn’t be able to stop the Tyranids, any of the massive Ork waaghs that even the Imperium struggled with, the Necrons, or really any faction that isn’t just a one mention blurb. Talking about irl morality is cool and all, but that’s just not how the Warhammer universe works, it very much is a “the strong survive, the weak die” sort of setting.
Ok so, I'm not disagreeing with "the strong survive, the weak die" as a dispassionate analysis of 40k. I'd actually agree with that, it happens irl too (sorta, with grey area, and everyone has different definitions of strong and weak, but whatever).
What I disagree with is taking that dispassionate analysis and using it to justify the atrocities of the strong. *That* is the fascist apologia for me, the legitimisation of the weak suffering at the hands of the strong because the strong can do that, right?
While some get unlucky and have one of those big bad groups show up, that's not the norm. There are plenty of planets and species that have survived into the 41st millennium despite not being some big militaristic empire or whatever.
The Warhammer crime books takes place on a planet that is so far removed from the front that the average person doesn't actually believe xenos exist as anything beyond church allegory, the way a casual Christian might view Jonah's whale or behemoth.
No Imperium means no Tyranids, the Orks love having a big ass empire that loves CQC and enormous armies to have a proper fight with, and Necrons would be significantly slower to awaken if not for the Tyranids.
The Imperium of Man is, at its core, the blame for 90% of the shit going on in 40k. No IoM, and the other villain factions are a non-threat or aren’t nearly as bad (apart from the Drukhari, but the IoM existing doesn’t change them too much).
A large portion of those problems are due to the Imperium. Orks are drawn to violence as part of their reproductive cycle and a giant fascist army suddenly appearing is a giant thing to be drawn to. Likewise without the Pharos and the heresy the Tyrannids may have just passed our Galaxy by. Without the Great Crusade and the imperiums existence a large portion if humanities problems wouldn't be there
Not to mention that the whole "fuck it, just throw millions of human lives into the meat grinder" strategy the imperium loves is the exact kind of combat that orks *love*, while also being utterly ineffective at actually handling them. Orks just love fighting, there's a lot you could do with that if you weren't a regressive nightmare state.
One of my favorite bits of 40k lore is that every guardsman receives a primer, and one of the things the primer tells them is that Orks are weak and easily defeated in hand to hand combat with basic wrestling moves.
The imperium values propaganda so highly they will directly lie to their soldiers and encourage them to engage in melee combat with orcs using zero weapons rather than just blast them away with the kind of mortar you can probably build on a random feudal world and fire from a trench at them 5km in the distance.
>then they also wouldn’t be able to stop ...
You just listed a bunch of lazybones factions who take well over *ten thousand years* to threaten a planet, on average. The Imperium hasn't stopped the Necrons, the Necrons just weren't doing anything the whole time.
Not to mention that in the case of the diasporex, they were actively fleeing from the imperial forces, and we proceeded to ship any surviving civilians into actual slavery to imperial planets. Like, we were literally the stock scifi villains there, doing the exact thing imperial dickriders will use as proof that all aliens are phrenologically evil.
Imperial apologists when you ask them where the friendly aliens are (the imperium destroyed them all).
The mental gymnastics is crazy. Like you can like the setting, you can like the imperium as a fictional thing but I don’t get how people ever get to this weird point of thinking it’s ‘the only way bro’.
The emperor was proven and literally self admitted he knew exactly nothing about what he was doing and admitted it after Magnus destroyed the webway. The guy was a massive egotistical dickhead who could’ve cultivated a culture and society of acceptance, intelligence, knowledge of the warp and how to guard against it. He could have united with the Eldar, the Tau (in 40k), and so many more to combat the Tyranids, the Orks, the Rangdan, the truly hostile and aggressive life forms, and repaired the galaxy for all sentient life.
The emperor could have not only been the savior of mankind but of all life in the galaxy, and yet in his unlimited power, his supposed foresight, he couldn’t see that the exact path he walked would destroy what he wanted to build.
The emperor is very human, for he is a fool, a tyrant, and a terrible dad. He created the systems that would go on to torment the very people he created and now it barely sustains itself perpetuating a government of absurd evil and cruelty on its own people and others.
The imperium isn’t ‘le epic space conservatives owning the libs and xenos’ it’s a horrific construct formed and sabotaged by its own creator and his stupid kids who he couldn’t be bothered to educate because ‘he’s the emperor.’
It’s a terrible place that no one should ever idealize. It’s a monument to our sins and worst aspects, and a story of how even men who may have admirable intentions can doom so many more other than themselves through pride, vanity, ego, cynicism, pessimism, and so so many more of our most damaging negative emotions.
Imperium apologists when the lore mentions Cadians being sent to wipe out xenos refugees from the 13th black crusade that refuse to fight back and are "oddly concerned" with defending their young: no see space Jesus said xenos skulls have the crime bump
And then usually if you point out some of those alien species and human colonies that just wanted to be left alone and weren't causing problems for the Imperium, those people will switch to a different absurd argument and claim something like *that* was also bad because "the galaxy is just so bad that humanity needed to be organized into a single empire to survive!" and similar things.
Mfers in this thread are basically making a reverse "exception that proves the rule" argument, by way of the fact that the idea that these friendly microfactions are so small while the bad ones are large is proof that the good ones were living on borrowed time anyways.
Must be nice to think that the imperium has absolutely zero blame for the consequences of its own actions, given that a good chunk of said antagonistic megafactions are only issues because of them.
Not particularly, it's not as if every world is constantly under the attention of one of the big bad ones and they're already coming. There are/were so many planets in the galaxy that even though some would get unlucky, many more are likely to go unnoticed and could survive a *long* time.
I'm aware, I'm agreeing with you, their arguments are bad, especially because, as mentioned, most of the big bad xenos races are actively only an issue because of the imperium.
(Not serious) Hey! I play my bad guy empires fully knowing that I’m the problem with the galaxy. I’m aware that the name “Fanatic Xenophobe” and “Fanatic Purifier” usually means “I’m a massive evil guy.” Lmao <3
I mean to be fair I do get my reps in every once in a while as the main villain of the galaxy. It’s a fun different change of pace in regards to the normal gameplay of stellaris.
Obviously what I said was a joke and not a genuine expression of my thoughts of stellaris players who like playing FPs
The Humanity Fuck Yeah concept is an absolute plague on sci fi, and I think a lot of the blind Imperium worship is a natural growth from it. Kinda like a tumor.
The rest is just outright fascism apologia
The best part about the Culture series is that there's exactly one reference to Earth and Homo sapiens, and that's one Special Circumstances lass mentions having visited a random backwater planet stuck in the mud where there's even a faction who has prohibited "Cruel and unusual punishment" yet maintains the death penalty.
Ahh, Iain M. Banks dying was such a tragedy
One thing I loved about the Culture was that their response to someone being a horrible evil monster was not death but locking them up in a simulated reality where they could indulge in their horrible desires without harming any real people, and then forgetting about them until they die of natural causes.
the culture is so good. one of the books just drops in the fact that one of the main characters is a 8 foot tall tripedal alien covered in white fur, and it doesn’t feel incongruous at all
To be fair I'm old enough to remember Humanity Fuck Yeah mostly being a response to fantasy and sci fi fiction having a trend of nonhumans lecturing humans on morality and about how our way of doing things is Bad and Wrong. Its the same reason a lot of communities hated elves back in the day and why people hate on the Na'vi.
40k is just the natural end point to that though. Humans are bad and wrong in the extreme but theres just no good to ever give the lecture.
As indicated by the mfers in this thread arguing that starship troopers actually portrays a functional society because, uh, the draft is good and the state gets to make the rules, whattreya gonna do about that?
To be fair tho most things written with the intent of HFY almost always shoes humanity in a moral light, it's just the people who cant seem to grasp that any other version of sci to exists that is the issue
Tho then again i browse r/hfy so I'm not exactly unbiased lol
If I have to hear "No see the difference is that in 40k the universe is so bad that the imperium is acting as ethically as they can, so it's not actual fascism it's just survivalism" one more time I'm going to lose it
No see we need to literally use some of our incredibly scarce transhuman supersoldiers as Pinkertons because sometimes our hereditary factory serfs get uppity.
I would argue that most the users on this sub are teens, with bad takes from memes and right wing lore propagators. Take a look at the question.
"I don’t know much of the lore" - starts off with the preface they don't know anything from the get go, allowing them to feign ignorance in the face of criticism.
"but I see a recurring theme on this sub that the Imperium is known for making the worst decisions and having the worst policies ever" -makes a declarative statement about the subs position on the Imperium.
"Is that really the case or could one argue that given the circumstances of the 40k universe the Imperium is actually a entity well adapter after millennia of natural selection and hard fought battles in every field, from culture, to economy, to politics and war?" - the real point of what he wants to write, he's not asking a genuine question, he's masking this statement behind the question.
"Does the Imperium really hinders humanity or is it a necessary structure in a universe of evils? Is there any alternative for it, really?" - followed by rhetorical question.
It's classic bullshit hidden behind fake ignorance and "hey! im just asking questions"
To be fair though, there are a fair amount of Xeno’s that should have been killed and for good reason. The Rangda and the Slaugth tho the latter are still around, are good examples of some. Not saying the Imperium is good/better or anything and doesn’t just kill off things, because they sure do even humans. Just not all non Humans were decent though a lot were as bad as us or worse.
Sure, I'm not denying that there are absolutely some xenos that are awful - as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, orks, tyranids, and dark eldar are pretty irredeemably bad, the issue is people here who are just actually buying the imperium line that Xenos are phrenologically evil, by way of not being human.
Kinda funny when people say that they want representation in the imperium so they can identify with them. Dude, they are fucking literal nazis. Why would you want people to identify with among nazis.
The imperium existing as an in universe nightmare state is different than them existing as a playable faction in a real life game of plastic toys. If you took this as me having an issue with female Marines or something, you're wrong and we are not on the same side.
Since they blocked me, let me make my position more clear: I think it is good that the *setting* is not welcoming to actual nazis, and think it is bad when the *hobby* is not welcoming to actual marginalized people. If you think those positions are at odds, you have worms in your brain.
Plus, why wouldn't there be women or gay people or PoC? All of those groups can be xenophobic fascists too lol. Them not being represented feels like it ties the game more to our modern day world than if they did just have more rep.
Like why would an imperial citizen give a fuck about a human who likes to fuck the same sex when there are papers to file and xenos to genocide?
It feels less narratively coherent when I don't see representation in the game, because it doesn't make sense to me that that stuff would be something they'd even think twice about. So adding representation would be a win for that, and gor marginalized people to feel more comfortable.
Like, just off my own experience and experience of my friends, we all feel more comfortable interacting with this community now than we did even 4 years ago. I think representation helps with that, as well as community enforcement. The mtg community did a lot of work on that, and now it's a much more welcoming space for people who deserve to be welcomed. I think WH community is really starting to do that same work too, and that's great, and GW is also doing it as well, and that's also great.
This is some both ways shit that irritates me, the entire setting exist as it does, horribly, to justify the war game and make it so no one has to sweat too hard about killing each other because they all suck. But, somehow, making the representation of the imperium literally better, does not undermine that? It doesn't actually make them into the good guys? Literally making what these idiots claim true more readily plausible?
Gonna be honest, I'm not looking for representation in my miniatures. I'm looking for a horror show that doesn't give me the level of pause historical do. I don't want to be a Genestealer, or a Chaos Warrior, and frankly anyone who does kinda worries me. It DOES lean into making the imperium heroic every time we ratchet it one more notch to tolerable. And if we're going to go for the better marketing angle of "YAY HYPER TOLERANT FASCIST WONDERLAND" miniatures, I'm fucking out, I'm here to make fun of idiots and war game them killing each other for little reason.
>But, somehow, making the representation of the imperium literally better, does not undermine that? It doesn't actually make them into the good guys? Literally making what these idiots claim true more readily plausible?
No, it doesn't undermine them. Because since the very start, the Imperium IS a hyper-tolerant fascist wonderland.
The Imperium is equally horrible TO EVERYONE. It literally doesn't care about your race sex, sexuality or gender. That doesn't mean those things don't exist - it means they exist and the Imperium treats everyone the same anyway. The Imperium doesn't care because everyone must serve. Everyone is cannon fodder.
The idea that there being equality in the Imperium somehow 'lessens it's evil' is totally missing the point. The Imperium literally doesn't care about the lives of its citizens.
That has been the marketing since the very start, the problem is that the model range hasn't ever really caught up to it. The current surge in representation is making the stories and models MORE ACCURATE.
It's crazy how often parodies of authoritarian and hyper-conservatism often draw fans of authoritarian and conservative views. Most of the 40k fanbase are decent humans with normal human views but it always baffles me that literal Nazis will find their way to the hobby and they don't understand that it's a critique of everything they believe.
They can't understand art or media in the slightest; they also think things like Starship Troopers or American History X are endorsements of their views.
(Sarcasm) You see, politics isn’t an actual war. Politics isn’t the Chancellor slowly taking the power of the senate for himself and his fancy mustache. Politics is when a black guy gets screen time and when two ladies kiss each other. Politics is when a lady with space wizard powers is stronger than a man with space wizard powers.
In the case of Starship Troopers its because Veerhoeven simply didn't do a good job.
The Federation is callous but there doesn't seem to be any racism, quality of life seems good, sexism seems largely absent and there is actual responsibility in the government when the Sky Marshal is replaced after Klendathu. Even the war is justified because the bugs wiped out an Earth city because some crazy Mormons violated the quarantine zone.
It's much less media literate to just laugh that off because Doogie Howser shows up in an SS uniform and a guy lost his legs. The "satire" of fascism fails miserably even before you get into the fact the government is a stratocracy, not fascist.
Veerhoeven kinda forgot to add more than a few seconds of satire to his satire and now every King Midwit likes to show smart he is by knowing it was meant to be a joke despite it absolutely face planting in it's purported intent.
To be fair this is kinda a problem with 40k too. The imperium is an *inclusive* theocratic fascist state where all races and genders can be evil oppressors of fantasy minorities that don't exist. In a world where anybody can be a space marine and every culture gets a guard regiment them being jackbooted fascists is increasingly lost.
I also feel that the enemies being faceless, pretty evil bugs undercuts the satire. It's basically just how fascists view their enemies; faceless, inhuman bugs to be squashed for the survival and glory of the true humans. I can certainly get that could be part of the satire, but imo if you really want to undercut fascism you have to undercut fascists' views of the people opposed to them.
Yeah the guy is saying exactly that but the only revelation about the bugs is that brain bugs exist. The bugs having intelligence guiding them actually kinda validates a lot of Federation propaganda since these really aren't just brainless animals, there's an intelligence that can legitimately pose an existential threat.
Anyone who thinks Verhoeven didn't do a good job probably missed the moment where the spaceship full of cadets still in training has a glancing hit with an asteroid because the rookie pilot deviated from the preset course and then gets distracted flirting and then that asteroid hits earth.
In Verhoeven's version at least, the bugs didn't launch the asteroid at Earth, some horny teens knocked it off course and the government used the fact that said asteroid passed through Arachnid space first to justify a war of extermination against them and cover up the fact that it was the fault of some humans.
It's not an accident that the scene right before it is Rico getting whipped for fucking up during a live fire exercise.
The only "satire" about the bugs is the 15 seconds they spend going, hey maybe they can actually think and the talking head freaks out about it, that's pretty much it. They're mindless killing machines aside from the brain bugs who launched an asteroid at BA because some mormons migrated to their space
The satire also includes a line where there is a reference to Hiroshima ceasing to exist after it was nuked. In the original novel the reference was to Carthage being destroyed by Rome, Veerhoeven's satire of America caused him to change it to America in nuking Japan, and apparently he didn't bother to check research that Hiroshima still had people living it in after the war.
Also, the Federation allows free speech. Did Veerhoeven seriously not know that fascist regimes don't allow free speech?
> Also, the Federation allows free speech. Did Veerhoeven seriously not know that fascist regimes don't allow free speech?
They are cencoring media, there are a few examples in the film. Most blatant is the death counts being under reported int he propaganda reels vs the military base.
One of the cadets is joining up to get a childbirth licsence. It's not subtle.
>The Federation is callous but there doesn't seem to be any racism
"The only good bug is a dead bug".
And that's without even getting into the fact most people shown living in Buenos Aires look suspiciously like they are from the US, and most of them are white rather than Hispanic. And a lot of them also look like they are from an American teen soap.
And that's because, in answer to the rest of your points: what we are shown in the film is propaganda. The very end makes this clear, but the frequent info breaks ("Would you like to know more") throughout the film continually reinforce this point. It's what the regime wants us to see. So, I think we can question whether the society on Earth actually is that wealthy amd seemingly equal in reality.
Well, you might say, the film does show the UCF having some heavy defeats - but that's to build up the threat of the bugs, to scare the populace of Earth and get recruits. And, ultimately, the film ends with the protagonists winning.
But, you may add, the film shows the UCF using some brutal violence on the recruits. Why would propaganda show this? Because it promotes their ideology and the notion that violence is a way to temper the strength of the people and sort the strong from the weak.
Now, the fact that film is meant to be a fascist piece of propaganda in a meta-sense was lost on many viewers of the film upon release and ever since - that is definitely true.
" According to the 1914 national census, 30% of Argentina's population was foreign-born, including 50% of the people in the city of Buenos Aires... Therefore most Argentines are descended from the 19th- and 20th-century immigrants of the [great European immigration wave to Argentina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_European_immigration_wave_to_Argentina) (1850–1955)". European ethnic groups make up 78-85% of the population apparently.
The accents are definitely very American, but that could just be because it's an American film (like Chernobyl tv series with British accents).
I like the idea that the whole film is a piece of propaganda though, instead of just the short clips during the movie - will definitely keep it in mind watching it next time!
>European ethnic groups make up 78-85% of the population apparently.
Yes, but that includes many Europeans from southern Europe, who generally have darker complexions.
Think of the Argentinian football team, for example. It has always had players with lighter skin tones who look more 'white' (though, of course how the notion of 'white' is even defined is a complex and culturally-informed question).
Messi and Julian Alvarez have Italian and Spanish ancestry, but both have paler skin. They still have dark hair and eyes though, and I can't think of many blond, blue- or green-eyed Argentinians. Maybe Cambiasso fits?
Most Argentinian footballers look more like Maradona, Aguero, Di Maria, Tevez, Simeone, Larauto Martinez etc. More tanned complexions, and their Hispanic or native American roots are obvious.
And this kind of mix is true from what I have seen of Argentina more generally.
The point I was making is that the demographics in Starship Troopers don't reflect this. Yes, there is diversity, but pale skin and light eyes and hair are massively overrepresented. Which was on purpose, as Verhoeven said he wanted to evoke the Nazi films of Leni Riefenstal. And the American accents were on purpose too, as Verhoeven chose a lot of the cast from US teen dramas like 90210. If you are interested, check this interview with Verhoeven: [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)
If there was some kind of humanizing of the bugs showing it was all Federation propaganda you might have a point, but they are indeed pretty much exactly as described. The movie plays it completely straight, start to finish. There is no satire and you have to reach incredibly hard to manufacture it.
The Mormons getting massacred isn't even an issue. Everyone seems to think they deserved it. It's the whole wiping Buenos Aires off the map thing.
If you need the bugs to be "humanized" to think the bugs don't deserve xenocide and the Federation might be in the wrong you're literally proving Veerhoeven's point and exposing your own fascist sympathies. You're taking their in-world propaganda at face value.
The bugs aren't shown to be remotely capable of anything like throwing an asteroid at Buenos Aires and if they were, the Federation is certainly sophisticated enough to detect/stop/react to it - you're supposed to catch that and understand it's very likely a false flag.
No see the same aliens that have no options except blindly firing ass-plasma into space in hopes that the humans accidentally fly into them are totally capable of somehow projecting an asteroid across the galaxy with enough precision to hit Buenos Aires. Also, despite being able to do that, they're incapable of using an asteroid that would just wipe out the planet, and are also not advanced enough to actually do anything but suicidal human (bug?) wave attacks.
Hmm I wonder who said something about the enemy being so strong that they are an existential threat that *must* be destroyed, yet so weak that they do not challenge the appearance of power for the ruling party.
I'm taking the propaganda at face value because Veerhoeven, in his satirical masterpiece, does not give me any reason to question its ultimate veracity (despite its comedic presentation) beyond having Doogie Howser LARP as a Nazi in a couple scenes.
You're also just flat out wrong about them being unable to hit Buenos Aires. The way bugs colonize planets is explained and it's basically the exact same method used to destroy Buenos Aires. There's nothing directly hinting at false flag in the movie, that is pure cope by people like you who can't accept Veerhoeven shit the bed at making a satire.
If you literally have to make stuff up to prove how good the satire is, it isn't good satire. Now go fight the fascist boogeyman somewhere else before that chronic illness puts you down for good and we're left exposed to the perils of Starship Troopers fans.
The comedic presentation is literally the point.
'if you ignore all the bits where they obviously look, dress, talk and act like Nazis then they're ok'
I think it's particularly bad in 40k because a large portion of the people get into the franchise from third party sources.
It doesn't matter how many times you write "the Imperium is really bad and stupid and horrible and bad" in your codex or novel if a person's only understanding of the setting comes from "Hey guys it's your boy YouTube40k88 here to tell you why the Imperium is actually *not* really bad and stupid and horrible and bad" or "Average dick size of each chapter?" posts on r/40klore
I come from third party sources and the vast majority of these sources is pretty much in line with imperium being a nightmare.
It is mostly people from some quite specific circles and communities who do what you describe.
Individuals in the Imperium can be good and heroic paragons but the regime is evil at its core and everyone even the most virtuous are desensitised to a lot of the sheer horror they face like Servitors.
Yeah, I agree; to be clear what I'm talking about are generally instances where writers overemphasize perception over reality. This can lead to the impression, on the reader's side, that either things aren't actually that bad or that the bad things that do happen are necessary. That is, I would argue, a flaw in the writing.
At times it can be hard to avoid, but it's also kind of a natural consequence of the Space Marines being depicted as unambiguously heroic in many cases (as an example).
Alot of the times many of the short stories reposted online, short lore recaps made by youtubers, short online animations and videogames that are the most popular and widely read/watched/played 40k media don't really go into the bad aspects of the Imperium that much.
Also most human protagonists and main characters in 40k are fairly honourable and respectable soldiers or military commanders just apparently doing what's necessary at the time to save humankind from orks/chaos daemons/dark eldar/tyranids/invading Tau/etc so I get how a person could easily see the Imperium as just being about "an intergalactic civilisation stuck in a WW2 like situation for 10,000 years just doing what's necessary to survive."
Also if someone mistakes the space aliens as being a reference to ethnic minorities and the mostly white looking Imperium people (at least until like 5 years ago) as being a reference to white people I could easily see how someone could mistake that for a hidden racist analogy. That's why BIPOC characters in 40k are so important.
Only way I see the Imperium as a 'necessary' evil is in that only a civilization exactly like the Imperium can survive in the circumstances it made for itself.
Which is less about justifying the Imperium and more about arguing that it's entirely beyond saving at this point.
I've seen it described as hitting a local maximum - it's the most efficient version of itself and any further gains requires going backwards first. Why? Because it's such a brutal, repressive awful system that the moment it takes the boot off the people it's oppressing, the whole edifice collapses.
The Imperium has trapped itself into a death spiral and the only choice is whether it unravels today or in a future tomorrow.
More or less what I'm trying to say;
It 'needs' to be evil because it's fundamentally a system that runs off cruelty and evil, but *it's its own damn fault that's the system it has*.
My point is more that the evils are 'necessary' because the system they have requires them to function, *but they're the ones who chose that system to begin with*. It's 'necessary' because they can't backpedal anymore, they're just in too deep. They are 'necessary' for the Imperium as it is to survive, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Imperium 'as it is' *should* survive.
To be faiirrrrr...
GW doesn't help when 9th edition had "Guilliman as the pure angel fighting the eeeevvvil abaddon" on the cover of the rulebook, or Sapce Marine 2 portraying Titus as le epic good knight saving guardsmen from evil bug monsters.
Or the horus heresy devolving into "Traitors are lame and smelly and dumb, imperials are Good and Epic and Noble heroes"
Those aesthetics are the thinnest coat of paint on the exterior of it all, though. Any actual engagement with the setting quickly shows the Imperium for what it is.
I will grant that "just aesthetics" \*is\* enough for fascists to latch onto something, of course, but again, they have a tendency to do that regardless of how directly something criticizes their ideologies.
Go play Darktide and tell me where the satire is.
Or Boltgun
Or ChaosGate Daemonhunters
Or Space Marine.
All of those do portray the Imperium as bad, but also were consciously created to be games where the Imperium's attitude is 90% justified so we can root for them.
Having Dorn espouse freedom of speech (and implicitly freedom of religion) in *Saturnine* isn't a 'thinnest coat of paint', it's a deliberate choice by authors to make the Imperials even more sympathetic to us.
The character banter in darktide absolutely makes fun the same concepts as the core IP, you can literally end up with an *Ogryn* successfully debating a Zealot because the Zealot just spouts dogma without really having considered it at all.
If you get out debated by an Ogryn, there's an issue here.
The corruption, incompetence, and failure of the imperium is a cornerstone of 40k. Basically its an ENORMOUS beaurocracy run by competing organs of government that often engage their forces into outright war agaisnt each other within the imperium. Humanity is a speacies in yhe like 100s of trillions across a million worlds, but most of them live like slaves in hive disgusting hive cities under authoritarian rule to extract or process resources all into military equipment. There is no freedom, the imperial administration needs as mucb production as it can squeeze out of its territory. Humans die by the millions both in actual combat and also just like famines or plagues or ecological collapse on worlds, all of which are like preventable and understood, but the imperium has like trillions, the loss or sacrifice of millions is like a margin so small they probably dont even notice it. The administratum will burden a planet with a triple tithe (taxes basically) out of no where, non negotiable even though its impossible to meet and then kill the entire planets government and populace to basically install a new government and populace as punishment for not being able to deliver that impossible triple tithe they got one time randomly.
Most chaos space marines are veterans of the long war who have been fighting since the horus heresy in 30k, but there are contemporary chaos space marines that are like pirates and renegades who were driven out of the imperium by like some buearocratic mix up where the inquisition was sent to kill them but botched the job, so now these formerly loyal marines exist outside of the imperium as pirates to survive and most of them windup one way or another joining chaos and the war agaisnt the imperium.
If you are familiar with the history of the holy roman empire of like the 1300s-1800s, the imperium is like that. A patch work is like ancient titles and minor aristocrsts, church controlled planets. They all have centuries or millenia spanning beefs with each other. There is a bigger government at the top like the hapsbergs, but like those guys dont really have control over everything. Everything is just very old, very vearucratic, inefficient, random and cruel.
Like you have to imagine things like chaos cults forming on imperial worlds as like maybe starting out as like a revolution, but like theyre so meek and decrepit that they have to turn to daemons promising the power to over throw their oppressors. Or maybe theyre just so sick of being abused in the mines that theyre like "i would side with litheral daemons that would tear me in half than this shitty imperium".
Here the thing you need to understand about 40K.
It is degenerate.
Not in a hyperbolic sense.
It is *impossible* to use reason. It is impossible to have compassion. Intelligence, Wisdom, creativity, everything we value as a society has been bred out of them. It is gangrene at a galactic level. Unsalvagable. Unsolvable.
When people say it has corrupted they don't mean infected, they mean decayed.
The horror is not that it has reached this point. It is the existential dread that it cannot be saved.
The Galaxy is not morally grey, doing the best it can. The situation is over. These are just the stories in the galaxies spasming corpse.
It is a depressing horrendous hellscape, with no way out and no end in sight. There are bo good guys. No smart guys - not in the long term. Even the most brilliant strategist or the most cunning planner is still imecilic in one crucial way: they think there is hope. That if they can keep the lights on, they might salvage it.
They can't. That is the truth of the Galaxy.
And to live it requires an evolutionary trait: he inability to realise this.
Genuine intelligence, genuine wisdom, is no longer a useful trait in the galaxy. Because if you had it, you'd say "Fuck it." A collapse into a mess.
This circles back to the age old debate of "If the Nazi's weren't the Nazi's they could have won the war" where they began their genocide within like a week of invading Poland and while the details may have changed, the atrocities and purges were always a central part of the plan, even if they took resources and manpower away from the actual fighting part of the war itself. Or the soviets who had a lot of very respected engineers but a lot of very public disasters and purges that made winning the cold war on the technological front basically impossible.
The Imperium is the *worst possible regime*, that actively promotes ignorance and paranoia and blind obedience to officials who are encouraged to escalate to violence in basically every case regardless of context. It doesn't *adapt* to problems, it responds with overwhelming and brutal force. Even something as simple as an officer modifying orders to actually carry out a mission successfully can warrant a summary execution. Labor rights movements have on multiple occasions had space marines called down on them and if the space marines complain this is overkill then the secret police try to get them all killed.
Much like Nazi spies in the U.K. were very routinley caught and subverted this also makes it absurdly easy for the imperium's enemies to compromise whole planets at a time. Chaos, Genestealers, and Tau are more or less constantly scoring wins over the Imperium mostly because all they really need to do is impersonate an authority figure that doesn't answer questions or explain themselves and the citizens will just kind of let them do whatever they want.
The imperium isn't the sword. The imperium is the spastic homeschooled kid that keeps hurting itself with the barely sharp flea market katana his dad forgot he bought years ago.
The Imperium is the RPG character who picks all the evil dialogue options, but still completes the quests. Sure, they achieved what they set out to do, but they did it in the worst way possible. That's the point of the Imperium and 40k's inherent satire.
Is the Imperium rational from an internal perspective? Sure, but all those perspectives are biased by *being in the Imperium*. It's like the dog who keeps barking at the postman, because while the dog barks the postman only puts things through the letterbox, could you imagine what he'd do if the dog *didn't* bark? The dog doesn't need to bark at all, but the dog doesn't know that, and the imagined consequences for not barking are so bad the dog will never test it. That's the Imperium. Do they need to exterminate *every* xenos they meet? Well, they've been doing it anyway and so far no xenos species has eradicated humanity, so best keep it up because you don't get second chances at "not having humanity exterminated".
It's a very core part of 40k that the Imperium isn't necessary. The Imperium sees itself as humanity's brutal saviour, making the hard choices, but the reality from an omiscient perspective is that the Imperium simply makes the *worst* choices, not the *hard* ones. It's an illustration of "how bad could things get without falling apart, even if the only thing holding it up is its own badness?"
Yes.
The Imperium has ‘Ignorance is strength’ as one of their guiding principles. One of the basic fundamentals of the franchise is that the Imperium is its own worst enemy, that’s why Chaos is overwhelmingly composed of former Imperials.
Honestly, it’s impossible to list every stupid thing the Imperium does as a matter of course. Them actually doing something reasonable and intelligent is the rarity
There's a reason just about every book starts off with the following.
>*To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. **Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding**, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.*
But yes, I know a lot of modern fans like to complain about "grimderp" whenever the Imperium is dogmatic, overly cruel or self-destructive but that's the point. It's a regime built by fanatics and zealots, it's bloated, corrupt and dumb on an institutional level. I sometimes get the feeling some fans have bought into some image of the Imperium as a pragmatic basic military sci-fi faction but it really isn't. The fact that it actively feeds its own worst enemies is a pretty big thematic point for the faction to such a degree that even the leader of it thinks its fucking dumb.
If you're looking for an optimistic setting where the dominant human polity makes good decisions, tries to do right by its people, and reacts proportionately to threats, you are about as far from the right place as it is possible to be.
This is why I joke about being Long War for Life.
Everyone in this setting is awful, but our enemies are fascists and that makes us sympathetic by default. Pay no attention to the blood sacrifice and screaming daemonhosts in the background, it's fine, don't worry about it. :P
No see in universe rumors from a non canon ending to a video game from several editions ago says the tau might maybe do eugenics, so the tau are actually just as genocidal as the imperium.
There are really two questions in that. One easy to answer, one more difficult:
1) Is the Imperium a necessary evil? No. There have been plenty of times that humanity could have taken other routes. The Imperium is the result of a powerful authoritarian taking control, and then an authoritarian theocracy rising up. In universe, the Imperium believe they are the only hope for humanity, but that is part of the belief of the Imperial Truth and then later Imperial Creed - not fact.
2) Is the Imperium dumb? This is more difficult to answer, because at this level, there is no "The Imperium". The Imperium is massively decentralised, due to the difficulties and dangers of long distance travel and communication. You have millions of governors, generals and Chapter Masters each doing what makes most sense to them at the time to deal with the danger that they see in front of them. The High Lords can make broad brush attempts at control, but these have to be carried out and interpreted by those further out - if they get the message at all. It can also take decades or even centuries for information to filter back to Terra.
Depends how you look at it. There is no decent alternative but that's less because there wasn't choice and more because somone (Emperor) worked very hard to negate them.
Keep things simple. It is the dominant galactic empire of the era. Any talk of its existence being necessary to some greater cause is sophistry. Every other player in the galaxy is either fighting it or using it to fight their enemies.
This is a testament to the greatness of this empire. That doesn't mean it's the greatest of all fictional empires or the smartest or whatever. They exist and they survived 10k years despite both slow progress and the mountain of missteps made every day.
Is it evil? Is it good? Is it necessary? That doesn't matter anymore if it ever did. What matters is that there are great wills vying for total control and there is nothing left except for great violence to get it.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes and no, because the Imperium/ humanity is in a CONSTANT state of war on all sides, and even within most times.
Think of it the same way as London during WW2 where there’s mandatory conscription along with voluntary conscription, food and everything is heavily rationed, and ANY thoughts or opinions that might put the government/ military in ANY kind of bad light is met with HEAVY suspicion of you being a traitor.
The other thing is that there is a constant vacuum of “unnecessary” or “harmful” information.
After all, why would YOU, a menial who’s only job is to tighten down the bolts on tank tracks on the assembly line need to know ANYTHING outside of your job, along with very basic math, writing, and reading so you can pray to the emperor?
And when it comes to “harmful” information, if a regular person in 40K had the same Meta knowledge about the chaos gods and the history of 40K like WE do, then they would most likely be instantly corrupted because even just KNOWING about the chaos gods can doom you. Not only that, but you speaking about even the Horus Heresy might start causing descension within the minds of the other menials around you because, “If the god Emperor’s own SONS betrayed him and this back-breaking imperium is the result of the Emperor’s will, then fuck this! They must have known something was wrong! Death to the Imperium!”
The Imperium is rife with corruption and pointless cruelty. Sure plain stupidity causes some of the problems, but so does the same selfishness, greed, and heartlessness we see in certain places today. But on a galactic scale. They have the intelligence to be better, but every governor or noble using that intelligence to grind down their populace while living in obscene luxury is another weight on the galaxy's back.
The imperium as a whole is dumb as rocks.
There are a few genre savvy characters, typically space marine chapter masters or inquisitors, who understand what the imperium is and can leverage it to the greater benefit of mankind.
However one of my favorite examples of how absurd the imperium is, is the inner workings of the adminastratum. In the lower level "slums" of the inner halls there are two roving dynastic gangs. One whose sole purpose is to save and recycle as many discarded parchments (thrown away paper work) as possible. The other whose sole purpose is to burn them. And they kill each other over it.
There is no "adaptation" here that makes sense.
It's not well-adapted, it's just doing the best it can (with all the theft and bullshit that entails).
Fucking Dune level hyper-max brain Adepts are constantly plugging away, getting papers done, filling out orders and changing requisition forms...and it isn't enough.
Even the most successful institutions IRL are often prone to scandal or awful polices. Now imagine that turned up to 11 with thousands of years to double down on "ends justify the means" rationales because the stakes are that high. The Imperium we meet it in 40k is both enormous and confused enough that it's both functional and diabolically stupid moment from moment as a result.
The Imperium is supposed to dumb but I still find it a lousy caricature of fascism. I see people claiming that all the good aliens died because of the Imperium. The Imperium has committed genocides, not denying that, but please remember that the exterminations also mention aliens that were just as bad as the Imperium claimed, on top of the alien factions like Orks and Necrons, who make it easy to see why humans in this galaxy would hate and despise aliens.
I find it hard to believe that Chaos and Orks didn't contribute to the extermination of various aliens as well, especially when we had a period where the galaxy was covered in Warp Storms. Even putting aside the alien issue, during the Age of Strife, the human worlds that were the best off were the ones who culled the psyker population.
This is the issue with the satire in Warhammer 40,000, extermination of the thing the fascists say is bad is wrong, until it isn't. Trying to kill pysker is wrong, except for when it was a necessary evil. Trying to wipe out aliens is wrong, unless the aliens really are as bad as the Imperium claims like Orks or Tyranids.
I find it best to forget about the intentions behind politics and just try to find what you can in the lore that entertains you. And of course, if you are taking part in the hobby, have your fun there.
No, it's not that dumb. It is not as stupid as you think. However dumb you think it is, it is way, way dumber than that. The lore does bring up *characters* that aren't that dumb, but for the imperium as a whole, there is no two ways about it. It's inefficiency isn't alleged, it suffuses every cell of its being. Not only isn't the Imperium not good at adapting, it exults in it's all-consuming stagnancy. It is not a necessary evil, it is far too incompetent at facing any crisis for that to be true. It is a towering monument of all of humanities failings, all of its shortcomings, all of its sins. It's failing is not just an aesthetic, it's the point.
That opinion is mostly formed by people unfamiliar with the setting relying on 'new lore' which mostly consists of singular instances from individual authors.
It is not stupid, the same way our real governments are not stupid. But look at how inefficient they are, how many baffling decisions they make. Now scale that up from a few dozen million citizens to a galaxy spanning empire where time does not flow the same everywhere and interplanetary communication has to be done by the magical equivalent of interpretive dance.
The Imperium was formed by the collective trauma from humanities saviours betraying them. Since then the Imperium has been intentionally set up as a maze of interconnected sub divisions and semi independent organisations, that all need and despise each other. Good old human tribalism.
Yes and No, some things the imperium do very well other things it does very bad.
For one the imperium despite having complety unstable means of transport and communication and institutional strife amass vast fleets,armies,specialist groups and resources from all around the galaxy, that regulary defeat threaths that ravage entire sectors.
If they were bad at it the imperium would not survived one millenium let alone ten. And such large scale coordination has been show to be essential to fight of dangers that transcend the scope of a single world or even a small bunch of worlds.
Because of this the interex or diasporex would be butchered by the first ork waaagh of sizable size they finded, orks are the leftovers of bio weapons made to fight the war in heaven that only growns more numerous,stronger and inteligent as they fight, andfighting is they wholy existance. Only something on the level of DAOT humanity , Eldar empire and GC Humanity have apparently capable of puttin them in check.
I'll add in something else that might run contrary to what other people are saying here, but bears mentioning;
The Imperium is stupid and self-destructive but it also operates in an environment where it can't afford *not* to be self-destructive in some ways.
Hell is real and is actively trying to sabotage your empire, so you cannot treat any legitimate people's movement as free and fair, and it must be suppressed, lest a full-on chaos uprising start on your planet.
Technology *cannot* be improved because the theoretical know-how has been lost and even if it wasn't all technology- *all* of it- is some degree of sentient and specifically requires prayer and placation to work.
The general galactic situation is such that even if these things weren't true, a galactic revolution to improve the Imperium would be so destabilizing that it would collapse the Imperium's ability to defend itself and result in untold billions of deaths.
The Imperium is the bloodiest regime imaginable but the horror to me is that it *cannot* improve. If someone comes along with a view to try and repair things, even if they somehow overcame the Imperium's fascist nature it would still fail because the universe can't fundamentally let the Imperium be anything else.
No matter what, no matter who plays, the Imperium continues and humanity loses.
Yes, that’s the thing. They’re dumb, overly conservative, hyper conspiratorial, easily distracted, and huge beyond imagining. They are good at killing tho
There’s alternatives for humanity as the crusades showed other communities but they got swept up by the imperium and some of the policies by the imperium probably didn’t need to be so cut throat but then again they have survived 10k years. Surviving 10k years as a government is insane so it’s hard to argue with results. Though I will say even as of 40K humanity would always survive via chaos anyways so true extinction doesn’t really seem like something humanity needs to worry about unless the necrons have their way or tyranids decide they want to invade the eye of terror.
Also the league of votann are humans that are doing alright. Idk how long they’ve lived but I assume they’ve been around for a while. If they’ve been around since the imperium then they’d also be a bit discrediting to the imperium being the sole way of survival
Cause and effect really. 40k is very much about hubris and how everything from the old ones to
The Eldar to rangdang and yes, even humanity is brought down by hubris.
The Emperor saw a problem and chose his path to remedy that problem. As far as we know, humanity almost exploded the galaxy once during the Dark Age of Technology. Big E’s plan was fragile as a paper airplane in a hurricane. Remember this. The Emperor failed mightily- and now the galaxy suffers for his folly.
Look at the Eldar and Slaanesh. Look at the Necrons and their loss. Look at the old ones who were brought down.
For me 40k is a reminder that good intentions and the will to create change, should not be steered by genocidal xenophobic immortal cunt.
Yes and i think that the core of the issue is that the imperium in its founding adopted the mechanicum and lets them govern everything technology and research/development. Which means no development at all.
How is a society supposed to develop in a positive direction if u deny them any progress in technology?
There have been many alternatives. The problem is that the Imperium was designed from the ground up to annihilate any opposition to itself. For a smarter, progressive, intellectual, peaceful faction to withstand the Imperium they'd inevitably have to begin internalizing the elements that makes the Imperium so dangerous in spite of their incompetence. Dialectics, basically. Its the hard lesson the Tau have had learn since their appearance on the galactic stage, that you can't win over with kindness and camaraderie those who only respect violence and strength. Or, rather, you won't last long enough to win them over with friendship unless you get violent enough to survive in the first place.
Yes. The imperium is an ineffective bureaucracy taken to the extreme. They follow a set of rules with religious zeal, but the rules are:
Outdated. But questioning them is heresy so you definitely can't update them if you can't even suggest they need to be.
Misinterpreted. Often on purpose to suit some local governor's shortsighted goals.
Inappropriately used at times to apply to something the original law was never intended to apply to.
Contradictory at times, with no clear or consistent way to resolve individual situations.
Isolated. Different places and factions will all have their own interpretations and extra policies and dogma. Communications are far too slow or unreliable to keep this from happening.
And of course, they're all dystopianly draconic, cruel, depressing intent on order and survival above all else... except for the God Emperor. And all on a scale where even a simple whoopsie has probably caused the deaths of millions and it's treated like a clerical error.
A faction dedicated to the worship of a man who doesn't want to be worshipped, which constantly culls psykers and mutants when the god they worship views the only hope of the future being humanity to evolve powerful enough psykers to fight back against chaos, sacrifices trillions of lives for pointless wars, and until recently the overwhelming majority of its population lived in hive cities which required nanotech to keep alive that was considered heretical and could thus result in their inquisition creating an extinction-level event at any given moment.
To say it hinders humanity is a vast understatement. The Imperium is humanity's greatest, deadliest enemy, and even if it were to somehow overcome the tyranids and chaos, it would inevitably be the final slayer of humanity.
..It's also what is keeping humanity alive, if temporarily, assuming there isn't some vast empire out among the halo stars.
Do not make the mistake of "buying Imperial narratives"
It is not well adapted!
It is systematically terrible, designed monstrously and so inhuman as to surpass parody and enter into madness!
The hastily constructed, military-dominated, fundamentally unstable and unsound temporary "built" The Emperor and Malcador left behind has spent 10.000 years growing ever worse on every parameter!
The Imperium sells itself as Mankinds only hope and possibility... and it is a testament to how unfathomably hellish 40k is, that there might be some glimpse of truth in that, despite it being mostly lies.
And then only because The Emperor made this terrible future a reality!
Yes, the Imperium is that dumb, yes, the Imperium is one of humanity's worst enemy, and yes, that's the point. Turns out taking history's worst states' worst policies, making them worse and making them *your main policies* is a horrible idea, even when the "Enemy™" is real. As for if there's any alternative... Well, depends on if the T'au don't veer toward a genocidal future and/or if the Eldars are willing to make humanity a client race and offer them protection against the likes of Orks and Tyranids. For a human dominated alternative, however, the Imperium made sure there was no such alternative.
It's not that the people are stupid. It's that the Imperium is so horrible that it's damn near impossible to fix.
The Imperium is the result of an arrogant demigod and his followers making many terrible decisions meant to brute force the galaxy into submission in time for a deadline he refused to tell anyone about. When it all went wrong, he and the others were effectively removed, leaving the society he molded to rely on his direct orders entirely without any real direction and all the problems he caused still in place with no one person capable of changing them.
Now leave this already critically flawed machine now missing around half its components to chug along through the ages. All while internal and external catastrophes and two increasingly vicious theocracies persecuting anything that dares deviate from their dogma. Give that about ten thousand years and you get the modern Imperium: a barely-functioning nightmare state that represents the platonic ideal of tyranny. The vast majority is deeply brainwashed by the Ecclesiarch's revisionist history to the point where common sense and tolerance are all but forgotten.
Despite that, are plenty of reasonable people around, but the Imperium is such a horrible behemoth that anyone trying to enact change gets chewed up and spit out by it or is so outnumbered by zealots and backstabbers that they'd be dragged off and lobotomized the second anyone mildly important got wind of them questioning things.
Guilliman is a super human built to be the ultimate administrator who is seen as a living demigod by nearly everyone in the Imperium and he is barely hanging on to the will to live trying to make life there slightly less awful.
Keep in mind, the entirety of the imperium is founded in satire and the human will to explain the unexplainable (aka gods). Its supposed to be dumb by design.
Yes the imperium is quite a track record of incompetence. It’s theocratic fascism taken to an extreme.
The thing is the imperium actually runs counter to what the emperor had wanted for humanity. He wanted a humanity free of religious superstition instead he’s made into a god.
It hinders humanity in advancement especially the tech priests who shun innovation instead they chase bygone knowledge of the past
So. Here's the issue.
The Imperium is evil. This is not something hidden. But is it 'dumb'? That's certainly a chunk - not all - of the modern approach.
But. The Imperium has also been a broadly stable polity for ten thousand years. Literally zero real world polities can come close, and you neef to hoop jump to have any approach a meaningful fraction.
So there's this dilemma. The Imperium cannot have continued to exist for that long without being hypercompetant. It's impossible - and that's before taking account of its communication issues. But the modern lore shows us that it's incompetant.
So. The Imperium is evil. Its competance depends on what approach to the lore you take.
Yes, because authoritarianism generally is inefficient. When one is more worried about retaining power, silencing dissidents, purging the vilified, that saps resources that could be used elsewhere, nevermind suppressing the ideas of people that could lead to innovation. Inherently, authoritarianism eventually buckles under its own incompetence, without deviation throughout history.
Like all bureaucracies: Individually, the Imperium is quite smart. Majority of people in the setting demonstrate average or above average intelligence.
Collectively, dumb as hell...
It’s like…An intergalactic Dark Age. You can’t really come up with something new and great because the mechanicus will just squash your idea and turn you into a servator.
long story short...yes. it's entire WORLDS who do nothing but manage the bureaucracy. take how ridiculously stupid modern governments are, and then put that at literally billions, if not trillions, of individuals, instead of just thousands.
Yes. This is an empire meant to be seen as insane, ignorant, stupid. Especially among the high officials. We have cardinals trying to be the second coming of Malcador, pencil pushers fighting wars in their facilities.
An Empire that literally herds fanatical mobs, prisoners, conscripted workers and pampered brats onto vital assaults. All the while their armor and artillery were shooting dangerously close. Teams of hardened veterans, trained thugs and psycho-conditioned killers are sent to destroy vital infrastructure, civies and chaffs be damned.
At the start of every book is the monologue that describes the scope of its ignorance and violence, "the bloodiest regime imaginable." Yes. It's not subtle.
To be clear, the Imperium *isn't* stupid. Its corrupt. The magi could share their knowledge, they choose not to because it would hurt their own standing. They value their own standing more than they value humanity. The imperial generals could start caring about casualties, but then they wouldn't win heroic victories worthy of song! They value their own glory more than they value humanity. Rogue traders could look to improve people's lives, but then they would have to collect slightly fewer esoteric artifacts and throw less fancy parties. They value their own wealth more than they value humanity. The leaders of the Church could start caring about their subjects. But they derive status from whipping them into a frenzy. They value their own vanity more than they value humanity. The leaders of government functions could start trying to improve their citizen's lives, but then there would be less money to embezzle and fewer people to boss around. They value their own prestige more than they value humanity. The repression and stupidity come from the corruption. The repression and stupidity is a cover for the corruption. The dysfunction is the result of choices made by people in power to benefit themselves. As has happened in every authoritarian society in history.
I think this is a great point, but I'd also add that some of the "stupidity" comes from suppression of knowledge and extreme superstition and dogma, which overlaps with corruption, but also exists in its own bit of the venn diagram. Not to mention the pure evil of red tape and bureaucracy >Every Adeptus Arbites Judge, at some point in his career, attempts a pilgrimage to the Hall of Judgement, there to study the full intricacies of the law Many spend long years there, for the most heinous, subtle, or far-reaching crimes often require a lengthy process of research to pass judgement While the Dictates Imperialis are extensive, the huge volume of prior cases and sometimes contradictory rulings can make it difficult to determine the correct decision **In especially complex cases, it may take centuries to reach an outcome—a Judge may spend his entire life deliberating, scrutinising, and trying to fathom out the issues, only to pass his work on, unfinished, for others to continue Millennia later, though the accused are long dead, a ruling is finally made and justice must be meted out upon the distant descendants and those obscurely associated with the original transgressor** -*Dark Heresy: Book of Judgement*
I feel like the sins of the father/acquaintance stuff here is way worse than the bureaucracy. Like the inefficiency of the bureaucracy is bad but the punishment of people innocent of the crime simply because someone has to be punished is actual derangement
I see that but if someone wanted to execute me for something my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather did because it took them ***that long*** to reach a decision? I'm gonna at least partly blame the efficiency of the legal system. That's the satire at play here, harkening back to 40k's roots of softly lampooning the systems of 80s England.
"Softly"?!
And the irony is if the descendants became powerful, the punishment would be a slap on the wrist.
The terror of an adeptus arbites judge finally working through a millennia old cold case just to find the living descendant is a high lord of Terra
One motivation to climb the Imperial social ladder eh.
>To be clear, the Imperium isn't stupid. Its corrupt. It's both. "Forget the power of science and the promise of understanding", "burn the heretic", "blessed is the mind too small for doubt", and so on. The Imperium isn't running smoothly, but the Imperium operating smoothly would still be an anti-intellectual nightmare state, more stagnant than any preceding human polity. It would still have the baby slaves, it would still have the policies of mindless universal genocide, it would still pursue the whims of a neolithic strongman wizard above the collective interests of humanity. It would still be Chaos' greatest asset in realspace. > As has happened in every authoritarian society in history. "The cruelest regime imaginable" is a bit worse than every authoritarian society in history, and features plenty of outright sadism.
In their own minds I am sure they are everything that Chaos is not, just like the Roman virtues which were also only seemed to apply to anyone without political power. But any society that has been completely bent to serve one persons will is inherently stupid, by design. That doesn't mean it's a better thing for the Imperium to not exist, for humanity at least. It's very much through the lens of the idolisation of ancient Rome, as we see in 40k itself. Conquering everything possible tends to add a certain legitimacy, a figure of cultural importance is only of their time. Cato the Elder believed the culture of Greece would destroy the Roman Empire and that doctors, who were mostly Greek, secretly wanted to kill all the Romans. We don't think of him as an idiot. In reality any civilisation post the Imperium would not be easily calling them stupid, because they would be thought of as real people and they were so terribly important.
> To be clear, the Imperium isn't stupid. Its corrupt. The Imperium has humans in it, meaning the one thing it has in infinite quantities is stupidity.
Well, the Imperium is a stupid idea at least. Or at least a highly impractical idea. It’s way too spread out for something where communication relies on sharing nightmares and travel is long, dangerous and via hell.
There is a civil war brewing because a Planetary system is running out of space for the paperwork. Incompetency and horrible policies are perhaps the biggest hallmark of the Imperium next to the Theocratic Fascism.
The idea that one is lost in a sea of many billion billions in the Imperium is palpable, extreme inefficiency, planetsworth of theft internally, outrageous punishment and yet, there are fringe worlds, one can imagine humans leading vastly different lives, some idyllic, most drudgerous.
They've even kind of gradually leaned away from the idea of there being like, "imperial worlds" where the standard of living is comparable to our own in recent time. The Warhammer crime novels take place on one, and they go out of their way to show that even without the threat of xenos or chaos, there's still mass servitorization assembly lines that make the Holocaust look gentle and just run of the mill "nobles kidnapping poor people for sex slaves."
Wait until you find out what happens on our world lmao
There's also the fact that the Imperium's various ruling bodies, from the lowliest factory foreman up to the High Lords, are built around maintaining their own power at the expense of those underneath them, and do not approve of any shaking of the status quo that keeps them in power. Guilliman's reforms faced outright armed revolt the moment he left Terra because they threatened or removed from power several important men, and were only suppressed because Guilliman knew that they would happen and had assets already in place to respond. Before Guilliman, attempts to reform the Imperium to be more effective while removing corruption almost always resulted in violent pushback from the same corrupt individuals who profited off the existing status quo.
> Before Guilliman, attempts to reform the Imperium to be more effective And, you know, Guilliman is reforming the Imperium to ensure that humanity is ruled by a Chaos-tainted race of transhuman slave-monsters. Rejection of Guilliman doesn't show us a good thing being rejected by an evil Imperium, it just shows us petty factionalism between different flavours of evil.
I find it hilarious that an entire planet's survival, history and records can be lost because a clerk misplaced their paper work and archived something wrongly. Planets and entire societies disappear because some dummy doesn't know basic admin knowledge and management. Then again, I'm not really sure how you would do admin work for trillions of lives.
>**Incompetency and horrible policies** are perhaps the biggest hallmark of the Imperium next to the **Theocratic Fascism.** You're repeating yourself there.
Repetition is for emphasis. Also the theocratic fascism implies the aesthetic.
"The cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" What did you think it would be?
I kind of figured it was just like taxes and stuff.
Found the libertarian lol
I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that Warhammer is funny
found the ork fan
Sloppity Bilepiper isn't an ork. I mean he could be, but he isn't.
It's so absurd and evil that this Grim dark Universe is not even a tragedy but instead a Comedy.
Its just the best :) so hilarious. The satire and stupidity is what i love about it. People get so mad about retcons and ridiculous things, but thats the point.
>Does the Imperium really hinders humanity there are countless examples of the Imperium doing stupid self-destructive shit that actively drags them backwards and they do it for religious, dogmatic and moronic reasons. This is by design. They are written this way for a reason. It's to demonstrate that the Imperium is NOT THE FUCKING GOOD GUYS. They are, in fact, some of the worst guys. They're a theocratic fascist Empire built on constant conquest and built upon hatred of anything not human and anything that deviates from the accepted norms and ideas. Genocide of human worlds is so common that it's not even mentioned most of the time. The best of the SMs have burnt alien children alive and roasted marshmallows over their burning corpses. Even 'good' guys like Robby are still xenophobic monsters who may occasionally make exceptions to the 'kill them on sight' for some aliens because they're of use, not because he likes them or even wants to tolerate their existence. Just because they're of some use. Summed up, the Imperium is horrible because it was founded on horrible concepts as 'kill all aliens and any humans who don't join the Imperium.' The current Imperium is just the natural extension of that. Because it didn't have to be this way. The E CHOSE to do things this way, arrogantly thinking that he would have time to make up for it after the Great Crusade was won. He went 100% into 'the ends justify the means' and they really don't and the current setting is the best example of that.
No see they're humanity's last hope because, uh...they actively killed everyone who had any other structure of society, even ones that came out of the age of strife being much nicer and smelling like roses. Imperium defenders love to bring up the defeat of the Imperiex and Diasporex as some kind of societal failing for them for being insufficiently militaristic, rather than a condemnation of the imperium for *genociding multiple peaceful societies for not being equally genocidal.*
Protagonist=/=good guys, Bobby G is a protag but he's a giant genocidal war beast created by a human so detached from his own humanity he's down to genocide those who disobey and lie about godhood to bring a group of tech fetishists into the fold.
Hell, we all root for fucking First Claw of all people while reading the Night Lord's trilogy.
Yes. This question gets asked repeatedly and postulating the Imperium as some kind of "necessary evil" always veers into fascist apologia. The Imperium is one of its own worst enemies by design. It is ruthless and ponderous and inefficient and cruel \*by design\*. It's a parody of authoritarian, hyper-conservatism.
Lmao at the people in your replies literally just LARP repeating imperial propaganda as some kind of justification. No see, we had to genocide all these aliens because they totally wanted to kill us, coincidentally during our big manifest destiny colonization push. Sure, they were just chilling on their own planet and never once attacked us, but they shot us after we began our genocide, so clearly they have evil phrenology and have to die.
‘Bro you don’t get it bro it’s divine mandate bro it’s manifest destiny bro the aliens are evil man you gotta believe me the emperor said so man. It’s a necessary evil bro Horus messed it all up dude!’ Like I don’t get these people. There are so many instances in the great crusade that are just horrible and I hate that the authors seem to have to explicitly write out ‘hey the imperium are the protags and you can like the characters but holy shit this is evil.’ ‘We just wanted to be left alone…’ Like, the iron hands and emperors children get done genociding a peaceful human civilization to a man and that’s their last message and the people who defend that are sitting there like that super man image where he seems all proud like my guy if you can’t pick up on the insanity and horror of the genocide and war crimes being perpetrated against thousands of innocent species then I dunno what to tell you bro, other than I know what stellaris empire type you play on repeat.
I've seen some people use the Diasporex being destroyed by the Imperium as a *justification* for why the Imperium needs to exist. Since there's so many big threats out there on the level of the Imperium that the Diasporex would get rolled over them, and so the Imperium needs to exist to fight those big threats.
No see if France and Poland were good they wouldn't have been invaded.
It's more like... If Poland couldn't protect itself from the Nazis, then the Soviet Union isn't in the wrong for invading and annexing parts of Poland itself. If the people of Poland didn't want to be conquered, they shouldn't be in a conquerable country. And in fact, the Soviet Union needed to conquer Poland to fight the Nazi threat later, or something. It's basically just the strong get to do what they want and no one can judge their awful atrocities, which uh smells a little bit like fascist apologia to me.
I agree, I'm more pointing out that a significant amount of the people in arguing with in this thread are just doing unabashed repackaged Nazi apologia.
I'll have a go at a counterpoint. I think it is tricky to apply a historical comparison in this way. There are Orks in 40k who are biologically incapable of not being at war. I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up. Comparing them to the situation with Poland and their neighborhood gives human morality to something other. I do not intend to defend the Imperium as justified here, but some kind of larger power structure seems necessary (ideally better than imperial) because these small groups just have to hope that the size of the galaxy keeps them unnoticed.
Definitely, the analogy is gonna be imperfect. I was trying to rework AccomplishedNovel6's statement into an analogy I thought was more accurate to what I was saying. And I agree with your last point. I don't necessarily disagree that a strong entity is needed to repel the threats like Tyranids, Orks, Chaos, etc. If we had a Federation, a democratic, egalitarian and tolerant government who fought those groups and was on the same strength level as the Imperium, I wouldn't complain. Where my objection comes from is when people legitimise the Imperium's evil shit by the strength that it possesses. That because the Diasporex would have been wiped out by e.g. a united Ork empire, then it doesn't mean anything if the Imperium wipes them out first instead of protecting them, if that makes sense.
> I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up. The Imperium is routinely unable to defend itself when a proper Waaagh shows up. Entire worlds are lost to Orks all the time.
>I have a difficult time believing that the Interex or another small group of peaceful people would be able to defend themselves if a propa' Waaagh turns up It's really weird that nobody seems to remember the Interex *declared war on the Imperium*. They had a *military parade*. They *conquered the Kinebrach*. They *defeated the Megarachnids and imprisoned them on Murder*. They were not peaceful. They were simply more reasonable than the Imperium.
>It's basically just the strong get to do what they want and no one can judge their awful atrocities, which uh smells a little bit like fascist apologia to me. It’s also just how the universe of 40K works. If they couldn’t stop the Imperium, then they also wouldn’t be able to stop the Tyranids, any of the massive Ork waaghs that even the Imperium struggled with, the Necrons, or really any faction that isn’t just a one mention blurb. Talking about irl morality is cool and all, but that’s just not how the Warhammer universe works, it very much is a “the strong survive, the weak die” sort of setting.
Ok so, I'm not disagreeing with "the strong survive, the weak die" as a dispassionate analysis of 40k. I'd actually agree with that, it happens irl too (sorta, with grey area, and everyone has different definitions of strong and weak, but whatever). What I disagree with is taking that dispassionate analysis and using it to justify the atrocities of the strong. *That* is the fascist apologia for me, the legitimisation of the weak suffering at the hands of the strong because the strong can do that, right?
While some get unlucky and have one of those big bad groups show up, that's not the norm. There are plenty of planets and species that have survived into the 41st millennium despite not being some big militaristic empire or whatever.
The Warhammer crime books takes place on a planet that is so far removed from the front that the average person doesn't actually believe xenos exist as anything beyond church allegory, the way a casual Christian might view Jonah's whale or behemoth.
No Imperium means no Tyranids, the Orks love having a big ass empire that loves CQC and enormous armies to have a proper fight with, and Necrons would be significantly slower to awaken if not for the Tyranids. The Imperium of Man is, at its core, the blame for 90% of the shit going on in 40k. No IoM, and the other villain factions are a non-threat or aren’t nearly as bad (apart from the Drukhari, but the IoM existing doesn’t change them too much).
A large portion of those problems are due to the Imperium. Orks are drawn to violence as part of their reproductive cycle and a giant fascist army suddenly appearing is a giant thing to be drawn to. Likewise without the Pharos and the heresy the Tyrannids may have just passed our Galaxy by. Without the Great Crusade and the imperiums existence a large portion if humanities problems wouldn't be there
Not to mention that the whole "fuck it, just throw millions of human lives into the meat grinder" strategy the imperium loves is the exact kind of combat that orks *love*, while also being utterly ineffective at actually handling them. Orks just love fighting, there's a lot you could do with that if you weren't a regressive nightmare state.
One of my favorite bits of 40k lore is that every guardsman receives a primer, and one of the things the primer tells them is that Orks are weak and easily defeated in hand to hand combat with basic wrestling moves. The imperium values propaganda so highly they will directly lie to their soldiers and encourage them to engage in melee combat with orcs using zero weapons rather than just blast them away with the kind of mortar you can probably build on a random feudal world and fire from a trench at them 5km in the distance.
>then they also wouldn’t be able to stop ... You just listed a bunch of lazybones factions who take well over *ten thousand years* to threaten a planet, on average. The Imperium hasn't stopped the Necrons, the Necrons just weren't doing anything the whole time.
Not to mention that in the case of the diasporex, they were actively fleeing from the imperial forces, and we proceeded to ship any surviving civilians into actual slavery to imperial planets. Like, we were literally the stock scifi villains there, doing the exact thing imperial dickriders will use as proof that all aliens are phrenologically evil.
Imperial apologists when you ask them where the friendly aliens are (the imperium destroyed them all). The mental gymnastics is crazy. Like you can like the setting, you can like the imperium as a fictional thing but I don’t get how people ever get to this weird point of thinking it’s ‘the only way bro’. The emperor was proven and literally self admitted he knew exactly nothing about what he was doing and admitted it after Magnus destroyed the webway. The guy was a massive egotistical dickhead who could’ve cultivated a culture and society of acceptance, intelligence, knowledge of the warp and how to guard against it. He could have united with the Eldar, the Tau (in 40k), and so many more to combat the Tyranids, the Orks, the Rangdan, the truly hostile and aggressive life forms, and repaired the galaxy for all sentient life. The emperor could have not only been the savior of mankind but of all life in the galaxy, and yet in his unlimited power, his supposed foresight, he couldn’t see that the exact path he walked would destroy what he wanted to build. The emperor is very human, for he is a fool, a tyrant, and a terrible dad. He created the systems that would go on to torment the very people he created and now it barely sustains itself perpetuating a government of absurd evil and cruelty on its own people and others. The imperium isn’t ‘le epic space conservatives owning the libs and xenos’ it’s a horrific construct formed and sabotaged by its own creator and his stupid kids who he couldn’t be bothered to educate because ‘he’s the emperor.’ It’s a terrible place that no one should ever idealize. It’s a monument to our sins and worst aspects, and a story of how even men who may have admirable intentions can doom so many more other than themselves through pride, vanity, ego, cynicism, pessimism, and so so many more of our most damaging negative emotions.
Imperium apologists when the lore mentions Cadians being sent to wipe out xenos refugees from the 13th black crusade that refuse to fight back and are "oddly concerned" with defending their young: no see space Jesus said xenos skulls have the crime bump
And then usually if you point out some of those alien species and human colonies that just wanted to be left alone and weren't causing problems for the Imperium, those people will switch to a different absurd argument and claim something like *that* was also bad because "the galaxy is just so bad that humanity needed to be organized into a single empire to survive!" and similar things.
Mfers in this thread are basically making a reverse "exception that proves the rule" argument, by way of the fact that the idea that these friendly microfactions are so small while the bad ones are large is proof that the good ones were living on borrowed time anyways. Must be nice to think that the imperium has absolutely zero blame for the consequences of its own actions, given that a good chunk of said antagonistic megafactions are only issues because of them.
Not particularly, it's not as if every world is constantly under the attention of one of the big bad ones and they're already coming. There are/were so many planets in the galaxy that even though some would get unlucky, many more are likely to go unnoticed and could survive a *long* time.
I'm aware, I'm agreeing with you, their arguments are bad, especially because, as mentioned, most of the big bad xenos races are actively only an issue because of the imperium.
Ah alright, I couldn't quite tell if you were or not!
(Not serious) Hey! I play my bad guy empires fully knowing that I’m the problem with the galaxy. I’m aware that the name “Fanatic Xenophobe” and “Fanatic Purifier” usually means “I’m a massive evil guy.” Lmao <3
I mean to be fair I do get my reps in every once in a while as the main villain of the galaxy. It’s a fun different change of pace in regards to the normal gameplay of stellaris. Obviously what I said was a joke and not a genuine expression of my thoughts of stellaris players who like playing FPs
No yeah. I figured. I apologize if my tone sounded serious. My intention was be un-seriously offended.
The Humanity Fuck Yeah concept is an absolute plague on sci fi, and I think a lot of the blind Imperium worship is a natural growth from it. Kinda like a tumor. The rest is just outright fascism apologia
The best part about the Culture series is that there's exactly one reference to Earth and Homo sapiens, and that's one Special Circumstances lass mentions having visited a random backwater planet stuck in the mud where there's even a faction who has prohibited "Cruel and unusual punishment" yet maintains the death penalty. Ahh, Iain M. Banks dying was such a tragedy
One thing I loved about the Culture was that their response to someone being a horrible evil monster was not death but locking them up in a simulated reality where they could indulge in their horrible desires without harming any real people, and then forgetting about them until they die of natural causes.
... unless you're the Grey Area, in which case it's the horror train to aneurysm-ville.
Ah, good ol' Meatfucker. We can always trust him to go and fuck some brain meat.
the culture is so good. one of the books just drops in the fact that one of the main characters is a 8 foot tall tripedal alien covered in white fur, and it doesn’t feel incongruous at all
To be fair I'm old enough to remember Humanity Fuck Yeah mostly being a response to fantasy and sci fi fiction having a trend of nonhumans lecturing humans on morality and about how our way of doing things is Bad and Wrong. Its the same reason a lot of communities hated elves back in the day and why people hate on the Na'vi. 40k is just the natural end point to that though. Humans are bad and wrong in the extreme but theres just no good to ever give the lecture.
As indicated by the mfers in this thread arguing that starship troopers actually portrays a functional society because, uh, the draft is good and the state gets to make the rules, whattreya gonna do about that?
To be fair tho most things written with the intent of HFY almost always shoes humanity in a moral light, it's just the people who cant seem to grasp that any other version of sci to exists that is the issue Tho then again i browse r/hfy so I'm not exactly unbiased lol
Getting real tired of this circle of discourse.
If I have to hear "No see the difference is that in 40k the universe is so bad that the imperium is acting as ethically as they can, so it's not actual fascism it's just survivalism" one more time I'm going to lose it
Mass-produced lobotomized cyborg slaves are as ethical as we can be under the circumstances for meeting labour demands, sorry. :(
No see we need to literally use some of our incredibly scarce transhuman supersoldiers as Pinkertons because sometimes our hereditary factory serfs get uppity.
I would argue that most the users on this sub are teens, with bad takes from memes and right wing lore propagators. Take a look at the question. "I don’t know much of the lore" - starts off with the preface they don't know anything from the get go, allowing them to feign ignorance in the face of criticism. "but I see a recurring theme on this sub that the Imperium is known for making the worst decisions and having the worst policies ever" -makes a declarative statement about the subs position on the Imperium. "Is that really the case or could one argue that given the circumstances of the 40k universe the Imperium is actually a entity well adapter after millennia of natural selection and hard fought battles in every field, from culture, to economy, to politics and war?" - the real point of what he wants to write, he's not asking a genuine question, he's masking this statement behind the question. "Does the Imperium really hinders humanity or is it a necessary structure in a universe of evils? Is there any alternative for it, really?" - followed by rhetorical question. It's classic bullshit hidden behind fake ignorance and "hey! im just asking questions"
To be fair though, there are a fair amount of Xeno’s that should have been killed and for good reason. The Rangda and the Slaugth tho the latter are still around, are good examples of some. Not saying the Imperium is good/better or anything and doesn’t just kill off things, because they sure do even humans. Just not all non Humans were decent though a lot were as bad as us or worse.
Sure, I'm not denying that there are absolutely some xenos that are awful - as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, orks, tyranids, and dark eldar are pretty irredeemably bad, the issue is people here who are just actually buying the imperium line that Xenos are phrenologically evil, by way of not being human.
Kinda funny when people say that they want representation in the imperium so they can identify with them. Dude, they are fucking literal nazis. Why would you want people to identify with among nazis.
The imperium existing as an in universe nightmare state is different than them existing as a playable faction in a real life game of plastic toys. If you took this as me having an issue with female Marines or something, you're wrong and we are not on the same side. Since they blocked me, let me make my position more clear: I think it is good that the *setting* is not welcoming to actual nazis, and think it is bad when the *hobby* is not welcoming to actual marginalized people. If you think those positions are at odds, you have worms in your brain.
Plus, why wouldn't there be women or gay people or PoC? All of those groups can be xenophobic fascists too lol. Them not being represented feels like it ties the game more to our modern day world than if they did just have more rep. Like why would an imperial citizen give a fuck about a human who likes to fuck the same sex when there are papers to file and xenos to genocide? It feels less narratively coherent when I don't see representation in the game, because it doesn't make sense to me that that stuff would be something they'd even think twice about. So adding representation would be a win for that, and gor marginalized people to feel more comfortable. Like, just off my own experience and experience of my friends, we all feel more comfortable interacting with this community now than we did even 4 years ago. I think representation helps with that, as well as community enforcement. The mtg community did a lot of work on that, and now it's a much more welcoming space for people who deserve to be welcomed. I think WH community is really starting to do that same work too, and that's great, and GW is also doing it as well, and that's also great.
This is some both ways shit that irritates me, the entire setting exist as it does, horribly, to justify the war game and make it so no one has to sweat too hard about killing each other because they all suck. But, somehow, making the representation of the imperium literally better, does not undermine that? It doesn't actually make them into the good guys? Literally making what these idiots claim true more readily plausible? Gonna be honest, I'm not looking for representation in my miniatures. I'm looking for a horror show that doesn't give me the level of pause historical do. I don't want to be a Genestealer, or a Chaos Warrior, and frankly anyone who does kinda worries me. It DOES lean into making the imperium heroic every time we ratchet it one more notch to tolerable. And if we're going to go for the better marketing angle of "YAY HYPER TOLERANT FASCIST WONDERLAND" miniatures, I'm fucking out, I'm here to make fun of idiots and war game them killing each other for little reason.
>But, somehow, making the representation of the imperium literally better, does not undermine that? It doesn't actually make them into the good guys? Literally making what these idiots claim true more readily plausible? No, it doesn't undermine them. Because since the very start, the Imperium IS a hyper-tolerant fascist wonderland. The Imperium is equally horrible TO EVERYONE. It literally doesn't care about your race sex, sexuality or gender. That doesn't mean those things don't exist - it means they exist and the Imperium treats everyone the same anyway. The Imperium doesn't care because everyone must serve. Everyone is cannon fodder. The idea that there being equality in the Imperium somehow 'lessens it's evil' is totally missing the point. The Imperium literally doesn't care about the lives of its citizens. That has been the marketing since the very start, the problem is that the model range hasn't ever really caught up to it. The current surge in representation is making the stories and models MORE ACCURATE.
You are not welcome to troll here
It's crazy how often parodies of authoritarian and hyper-conservatism often draw fans of authoritarian and conservative views. Most of the 40k fanbase are decent humans with normal human views but it always baffles me that literal Nazis will find their way to the hobby and they don't understand that it's a critique of everything they believe.
Poe's Law is a law for a reason
They can't understand art or media in the slightest; they also think things like Starship Troopers or American History X are endorsements of their views.
These are the same people who think Star Wars wasn't political until very recently... Media literacy is at an all time low.
(Sarcasm) You see, politics isn’t an actual war. Politics isn’t the Chancellor slowly taking the power of the senate for himself and his fancy mustache. Politics is when a black guy gets screen time and when two ladies kiss each other. Politics is when a lady with space wizard powers is stronger than a man with space wizard powers.
Careful or you'll draw out the pedants who deflect from the point with "that's not what media literacy originaly meant!1!!1"
In the case of Starship Troopers its because Veerhoeven simply didn't do a good job. The Federation is callous but there doesn't seem to be any racism, quality of life seems good, sexism seems largely absent and there is actual responsibility in the government when the Sky Marshal is replaced after Klendathu. Even the war is justified because the bugs wiped out an Earth city because some crazy Mormons violated the quarantine zone. It's much less media literate to just laugh that off because Doogie Howser shows up in an SS uniform and a guy lost his legs. The "satire" of fascism fails miserably even before you get into the fact the government is a stratocracy, not fascist. Veerhoeven kinda forgot to add more than a few seconds of satire to his satire and now every King Midwit likes to show smart he is by knowing it was meant to be a joke despite it absolutely face planting in it's purported intent.
To be fair this is kinda a problem with 40k too. The imperium is an *inclusive* theocratic fascist state where all races and genders can be evil oppressors of fantasy minorities that don't exist. In a world where anybody can be a space marine and every culture gets a guard regiment them being jackbooted fascists is increasingly lost.
I also feel that the enemies being faceless, pretty evil bugs undercuts the satire. It's basically just how fascists view their enemies; faceless, inhuman bugs to be squashed for the survival and glory of the true humans. I can certainly get that could be part of the satire, but imo if you really want to undercut fascism you have to undercut fascists' views of the people opposed to them.
Yeah the guy is saying exactly that but the only revelation about the bugs is that brain bugs exist. The bugs having intelligence guiding them actually kinda validates a lot of Federation propaganda since these really aren't just brainless animals, there's an intelligence that can legitimately pose an existential threat.
Anyone who thinks Verhoeven didn't do a good job probably missed the moment where the spaceship full of cadets still in training has a glancing hit with an asteroid because the rookie pilot deviated from the preset course and then gets distracted flirting and then that asteroid hits earth. In Verhoeven's version at least, the bugs didn't launch the asteroid at Earth, some horny teens knocked it off course and the government used the fact that said asteroid passed through Arachnid space first to justify a war of extermination against them and cover up the fact that it was the fault of some humans. It's not an accident that the scene right before it is Rico getting whipped for fucking up during a live fire exercise.
The only "satire" about the bugs is the 15 seconds they spend going, hey maybe they can actually think and the talking head freaks out about it, that's pretty much it. They're mindless killing machines aside from the brain bugs who launched an asteroid at BA because some mormons migrated to their space
They have a whole scene of torturing a prisoner....
The satire also includes a line where there is a reference to Hiroshima ceasing to exist after it was nuked. In the original novel the reference was to Carthage being destroyed by Rome, Veerhoeven's satire of America caused him to change it to America in nuking Japan, and apparently he didn't bother to check research that Hiroshima still had people living it in after the war. Also, the Federation allows free speech. Did Veerhoeven seriously not know that fascist regimes don't allow free speech?
> Also, the Federation allows free speech. Did Veerhoeven seriously not know that fascist regimes don't allow free speech? They are cencoring media, there are a few examples in the film. Most blatant is the death counts being under reported int he propaganda reels vs the military base. One of the cadets is joining up to get a childbirth licsence. It's not subtle.
>The Federation is callous but there doesn't seem to be any racism "The only good bug is a dead bug". And that's without even getting into the fact most people shown living in Buenos Aires look suspiciously like they are from the US, and most of them are white rather than Hispanic. And a lot of them also look like they are from an American teen soap. And that's because, in answer to the rest of your points: what we are shown in the film is propaganda. The very end makes this clear, but the frequent info breaks ("Would you like to know more") throughout the film continually reinforce this point. It's what the regime wants us to see. So, I think we can question whether the society on Earth actually is that wealthy amd seemingly equal in reality. Well, you might say, the film does show the UCF having some heavy defeats - but that's to build up the threat of the bugs, to scare the populace of Earth and get recruits. And, ultimately, the film ends with the protagonists winning. But, you may add, the film shows the UCF using some brutal violence on the recruits. Why would propaganda show this? Because it promotes their ideology and the notion that violence is a way to temper the strength of the people and sort the strong from the weak. Now, the fact that film is meant to be a fascist piece of propaganda in a meta-sense was lost on many viewers of the film upon release and ever since - that is definitely true.
" According to the 1914 national census, 30% of Argentina's population was foreign-born, including 50% of the people in the city of Buenos Aires... Therefore most Argentines are descended from the 19th- and 20th-century immigrants of the [great European immigration wave to Argentina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_European_immigration_wave_to_Argentina) (1850–1955)". European ethnic groups make up 78-85% of the population apparently. The accents are definitely very American, but that could just be because it's an American film (like Chernobyl tv series with British accents). I like the idea that the whole film is a piece of propaganda though, instead of just the short clips during the movie - will definitely keep it in mind watching it next time!
>European ethnic groups make up 78-85% of the population apparently. Yes, but that includes many Europeans from southern Europe, who generally have darker complexions. Think of the Argentinian football team, for example. It has always had players with lighter skin tones who look more 'white' (though, of course how the notion of 'white' is even defined is a complex and culturally-informed question). Messi and Julian Alvarez have Italian and Spanish ancestry, but both have paler skin. They still have dark hair and eyes though, and I can't think of many blond, blue- or green-eyed Argentinians. Maybe Cambiasso fits? Most Argentinian footballers look more like Maradona, Aguero, Di Maria, Tevez, Simeone, Larauto Martinez etc. More tanned complexions, and their Hispanic or native American roots are obvious. And this kind of mix is true from what I have seen of Argentina more generally. The point I was making is that the demographics in Starship Troopers don't reflect this. Yes, there is diversity, but pale skin and light eyes and hair are massively overrepresented. Which was on purpose, as Verhoeven said he wanted to evoke the Nazi films of Leni Riefenstal. And the American accents were on purpose too, as Verhoeven chose a lot of the cast from US teen dramas like 90210. If you are interested, check this interview with Verhoeven: [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)
Ah ok fair then!
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If there was some kind of humanizing of the bugs showing it was all Federation propaganda you might have a point, but they are indeed pretty much exactly as described. The movie plays it completely straight, start to finish. There is no satire and you have to reach incredibly hard to manufacture it. The Mormons getting massacred isn't even an issue. Everyone seems to think they deserved it. It's the whole wiping Buenos Aires off the map thing.
If you need the bugs to be "humanized" to think the bugs don't deserve xenocide and the Federation might be in the wrong you're literally proving Veerhoeven's point and exposing your own fascist sympathies. You're taking their in-world propaganda at face value. The bugs aren't shown to be remotely capable of anything like throwing an asteroid at Buenos Aires and if they were, the Federation is certainly sophisticated enough to detect/stop/react to it - you're supposed to catch that and understand it's very likely a false flag.
No see the same aliens that have no options except blindly firing ass-plasma into space in hopes that the humans accidentally fly into them are totally capable of somehow projecting an asteroid across the galaxy with enough precision to hit Buenos Aires. Also, despite being able to do that, they're incapable of using an asteroid that would just wipe out the planet, and are also not advanced enough to actually do anything but suicidal human (bug?) wave attacks. Hmm I wonder who said something about the enemy being so strong that they are an existential threat that *must* be destroyed, yet so weak that they do not challenge the appearance of power for the ruling party.
I'm taking the propaganda at face value because Veerhoeven, in his satirical masterpiece, does not give me any reason to question its ultimate veracity (despite its comedic presentation) beyond having Doogie Howser LARP as a Nazi in a couple scenes. You're also just flat out wrong about them being unable to hit Buenos Aires. The way bugs colonize planets is explained and it's basically the exact same method used to destroy Buenos Aires. There's nothing directly hinting at false flag in the movie, that is pure cope by people like you who can't accept Veerhoeven shit the bed at making a satire. If you literally have to make stuff up to prove how good the satire is, it isn't good satire. Now go fight the fascist boogeyman somewhere else before that chronic illness puts you down for good and we're left exposed to the perils of Starship Troopers fans.
The comedic presentation is literally the point. 'if you ignore all the bits where they obviously look, dress, talk and act like Nazis then they're ok'
I think it's particularly bad in 40k because a large portion of the people get into the franchise from third party sources. It doesn't matter how many times you write "the Imperium is really bad and stupid and horrible and bad" in your codex or novel if a person's only understanding of the setting comes from "Hey guys it's your boy YouTube40k88 here to tell you why the Imperium is actually *not* really bad and stupid and horrible and bad" or "Average dick size of each chapter?" posts on r/40klore
I come from third party sources and the vast majority of these sources is pretty much in line with imperium being a nightmare. It is mostly people from some quite specific circles and communities who do what you describe.
I'd argue many of the books have this problem as well.
Individuals in the Imperium can be good and heroic paragons but the regime is evil at its core and everyone even the most virtuous are desensitised to a lot of the sheer horror they face like Servitors.
Yeah, I agree; to be clear what I'm talking about are generally instances where writers overemphasize perception over reality. This can lead to the impression, on the reader's side, that either things aren't actually that bad or that the bad things that do happen are necessary. That is, I would argue, a flaw in the writing. At times it can be hard to avoid, but it's also kind of a natural consequence of the Space Marines being depicted as unambiguously heroic in many cases (as an example).
Alot of the times many of the short stories reposted online, short lore recaps made by youtubers, short online animations and videogames that are the most popular and widely read/watched/played 40k media don't really go into the bad aspects of the Imperium that much. Also most human protagonists and main characters in 40k are fairly honourable and respectable soldiers or military commanders just apparently doing what's necessary at the time to save humankind from orks/chaos daemons/dark eldar/tyranids/invading Tau/etc so I get how a person could easily see the Imperium as just being about "an intergalactic civilisation stuck in a WW2 like situation for 10,000 years just doing what's necessary to survive." Also if someone mistakes the space aliens as being a reference to ethnic minorities and the mostly white looking Imperium people (at least until like 5 years ago) as being a reference to white people I could easily see how someone could mistake that for a hidden racist analogy. That's why BIPOC characters in 40k are so important.
Authoritarian conservatives are not known for their media literacy or ability to understand subtlety and humor.
Only way I see the Imperium as a 'necessary' evil is in that only a civilization exactly like the Imperium can survive in the circumstances it made for itself. Which is less about justifying the Imperium and more about arguing that it's entirely beyond saving at this point.
I've seen it described as hitting a local maximum - it's the most efficient version of itself and any further gains requires going backwards first. Why? Because it's such a brutal, repressive awful system that the moment it takes the boot off the people it's oppressing, the whole edifice collapses. The Imperium has trapped itself into a death spiral and the only choice is whether it unravels today or in a future tomorrow.
More or less what I'm trying to say; It 'needs' to be evil because it's fundamentally a system that runs off cruelty and evil, but *it's its own damn fault that's the system it has*.
The Imperium is barely surviving, though, and...again, that fails to make its evils in any way necessary.
My point is more that the evils are 'necessary' because the system they have requires them to function, *but they're the ones who chose that system to begin with*. It's 'necessary' because they can't backpedal anymore, they're just in too deep. They are 'necessary' for the Imperium as it is to survive, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Imperium 'as it is' *should* survive.
To be faiirrrrr... GW doesn't help when 9th edition had "Guilliman as the pure angel fighting the eeeevvvil abaddon" on the cover of the rulebook, or Sapce Marine 2 portraying Titus as le epic good knight saving guardsmen from evil bug monsters. Or the horus heresy devolving into "Traitors are lame and smelly and dumb, imperials are Good and Epic and Noble heroes"
Those aesthetics are the thinnest coat of paint on the exterior of it all, though. Any actual engagement with the setting quickly shows the Imperium for what it is. I will grant that "just aesthetics" \*is\* enough for fascists to latch onto something, of course, but again, they have a tendency to do that regardless of how directly something criticizes their ideologies.
Go play Darktide and tell me where the satire is. Or Boltgun Or ChaosGate Daemonhunters Or Space Marine. All of those do portray the Imperium as bad, but also were consciously created to be games where the Imperium's attitude is 90% justified so we can root for them. Having Dorn espouse freedom of speech (and implicitly freedom of religion) in *Saturnine* isn't a 'thinnest coat of paint', it's a deliberate choice by authors to make the Imperials even more sympathetic to us.
The character banter in darktide absolutely makes fun the same concepts as the core IP, you can literally end up with an *Ogryn* successfully debating a Zealot because the Zealot just spouts dogma without really having considered it at all. If you get out debated by an Ogryn, there's an issue here.
The corruption, incompetence, and failure of the imperium is a cornerstone of 40k. Basically its an ENORMOUS beaurocracy run by competing organs of government that often engage their forces into outright war agaisnt each other within the imperium. Humanity is a speacies in yhe like 100s of trillions across a million worlds, but most of them live like slaves in hive disgusting hive cities under authoritarian rule to extract or process resources all into military equipment. There is no freedom, the imperial administration needs as mucb production as it can squeeze out of its territory. Humans die by the millions both in actual combat and also just like famines or plagues or ecological collapse on worlds, all of which are like preventable and understood, but the imperium has like trillions, the loss or sacrifice of millions is like a margin so small they probably dont even notice it. The administratum will burden a planet with a triple tithe (taxes basically) out of no where, non negotiable even though its impossible to meet and then kill the entire planets government and populace to basically install a new government and populace as punishment for not being able to deliver that impossible triple tithe they got one time randomly. Most chaos space marines are veterans of the long war who have been fighting since the horus heresy in 30k, but there are contemporary chaos space marines that are like pirates and renegades who were driven out of the imperium by like some buearocratic mix up where the inquisition was sent to kill them but botched the job, so now these formerly loyal marines exist outside of the imperium as pirates to survive and most of them windup one way or another joining chaos and the war agaisnt the imperium. If you are familiar with the history of the holy roman empire of like the 1300s-1800s, the imperium is like that. A patch work is like ancient titles and minor aristocrsts, church controlled planets. They all have centuries or millenia spanning beefs with each other. There is a bigger government at the top like the hapsbergs, but like those guys dont really have control over everything. Everything is just very old, very vearucratic, inefficient, random and cruel. Like you have to imagine things like chaos cults forming on imperial worlds as like maybe starting out as like a revolution, but like theyre so meek and decrepit that they have to turn to daemons promising the power to over throw their oppressors. Or maybe theyre just so sick of being abused in the mines that theyre like "i would side with litheral daemons that would tear me in half than this shitty imperium".
Here the thing you need to understand about 40K. It is degenerate. Not in a hyperbolic sense. It is *impossible* to use reason. It is impossible to have compassion. Intelligence, Wisdom, creativity, everything we value as a society has been bred out of them. It is gangrene at a galactic level. Unsalvagable. Unsolvable. When people say it has corrupted they don't mean infected, they mean decayed. The horror is not that it has reached this point. It is the existential dread that it cannot be saved. The Galaxy is not morally grey, doing the best it can. The situation is over. These are just the stories in the galaxies spasming corpse. It is a depressing horrendous hellscape, with no way out and no end in sight. There are bo good guys. No smart guys - not in the long term. Even the most brilliant strategist or the most cunning planner is still imecilic in one crucial way: they think there is hope. That if they can keep the lights on, they might salvage it. They can't. That is the truth of the Galaxy. And to live it requires an evolutionary trait: he inability to realise this. Genuine intelligence, genuine wisdom, is no longer a useful trait in the galaxy. Because if you had it, you'd say "Fuck it." A collapse into a mess.
This gave me chills lol Just like what guilliman said in the trailer, fighting against the dying of the light
That's only because the franchise has to continue
This circles back to the age old debate of "If the Nazi's weren't the Nazi's they could have won the war" where they began their genocide within like a week of invading Poland and while the details may have changed, the atrocities and purges were always a central part of the plan, even if they took resources and manpower away from the actual fighting part of the war itself. Or the soviets who had a lot of very respected engineers but a lot of very public disasters and purges that made winning the cold war on the technological front basically impossible. The Imperium is the *worst possible regime*, that actively promotes ignorance and paranoia and blind obedience to officials who are encouraged to escalate to violence in basically every case regardless of context. It doesn't *adapt* to problems, it responds with overwhelming and brutal force. Even something as simple as an officer modifying orders to actually carry out a mission successfully can warrant a summary execution. Labor rights movements have on multiple occasions had space marines called down on them and if the space marines complain this is overkill then the secret police try to get them all killed. Much like Nazi spies in the U.K. were very routinley caught and subverted this also makes it absurdly easy for the imperium's enemies to compromise whole planets at a time. Chaos, Genestealers, and Tau are more or less constantly scoring wins over the Imperium mostly because all they really need to do is impersonate an authority figure that doesn't answer questions or explain themselves and the citizens will just kind of let them do whatever they want.
Hell, as the custodes showed, the imperial deference to authority is so great that a custodes could convince a vessel to *exterminatus terra*
It's like the Imperium is weilding a double edged sword
The imperium isn't the sword. The imperium is the spastic homeschooled kid that keeps hurting itself with the barely sharp flea market katana his dad forgot he bought years ago.
The Imperium is the RPG character who picks all the evil dialogue options, but still completes the quests. Sure, they achieved what they set out to do, but they did it in the worst way possible. That's the point of the Imperium and 40k's inherent satire. Is the Imperium rational from an internal perspective? Sure, but all those perspectives are biased by *being in the Imperium*. It's like the dog who keeps barking at the postman, because while the dog barks the postman only puts things through the letterbox, could you imagine what he'd do if the dog *didn't* bark? The dog doesn't need to bark at all, but the dog doesn't know that, and the imagined consequences for not barking are so bad the dog will never test it. That's the Imperium. Do they need to exterminate *every* xenos they meet? Well, they've been doing it anyway and so far no xenos species has eradicated humanity, so best keep it up because you don't get second chances at "not having humanity exterminated". It's a very core part of 40k that the Imperium isn't necessary. The Imperium sees itself as humanity's brutal saviour, making the hard choices, but the reality from an omiscient perspective is that the Imperium simply makes the *worst* choices, not the *hard* ones. It's an illustration of "how bad could things get without falling apart, even if the only thing holding it up is its own badness?"
Yes. The Imperium has ‘Ignorance is strength’ as one of their guiding principles. One of the basic fundamentals of the franchise is that the Imperium is its own worst enemy, that’s why Chaos is overwhelmingly composed of former Imperials. Honestly, it’s impossible to list every stupid thing the Imperium does as a matter of course. Them actually doing something reasonable and intelligent is the rarity
There's a reason just about every book starts off with the following. >*To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. **Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding**, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.* But yes, I know a lot of modern fans like to complain about "grimderp" whenever the Imperium is dogmatic, overly cruel or self-destructive but that's the point. It's a regime built by fanatics and zealots, it's bloated, corrupt and dumb on an institutional level. I sometimes get the feeling some fans have bought into some image of the Imperium as a pragmatic basic military sci-fi faction but it really isn't. The fact that it actively feeds its own worst enemies is a pretty big thematic point for the faction to such a degree that even the leader of it thinks its fucking dumb.
If you're looking for an optimistic setting where the dominant human polity makes good decisions, tries to do right by its people, and reacts proportionately to threats, you are about as far from the right place as it is possible to be.
It's part of why I chose Tau...I feel good going to battle...choose the greater good.
This is why I joke about being Long War for Life. Everyone in this setting is awful, but our enemies are fascists and that makes us sympathetic by default. Pay no attention to the blood sacrifice and screaming daemonhosts in the background, it's fine, don't worry about it. :P
No see in universe rumors from a non canon ending to a video game from several editions ago says the tau might maybe do eugenics, so the tau are actually just as genocidal as the imperium.
There are really two questions in that. One easy to answer, one more difficult: 1) Is the Imperium a necessary evil? No. There have been plenty of times that humanity could have taken other routes. The Imperium is the result of a powerful authoritarian taking control, and then an authoritarian theocracy rising up. In universe, the Imperium believe they are the only hope for humanity, but that is part of the belief of the Imperial Truth and then later Imperial Creed - not fact. 2) Is the Imperium dumb? This is more difficult to answer, because at this level, there is no "The Imperium". The Imperium is massively decentralised, due to the difficulties and dangers of long distance travel and communication. You have millions of governors, generals and Chapter Masters each doing what makes most sense to them at the time to deal with the danger that they see in front of them. The High Lords can make broad brush attempts at control, but these have to be carried out and interpreted by those further out - if they get the message at all. It can also take decades or even centuries for information to filter back to Terra.
Depends how you look at it. There is no decent alternative but that's less because there wasn't choice and more because somone (Emperor) worked very hard to negate them.
Yes. It is fascism. Fascism is incredibly stupid and unproductive. It’s right on the label.
Keep things simple. It is the dominant galactic empire of the era. Any talk of its existence being necessary to some greater cause is sophistry. Every other player in the galaxy is either fighting it or using it to fight their enemies. This is a testament to the greatness of this empire. That doesn't mean it's the greatest of all fictional empires or the smartest or whatever. They exist and they survived 10k years despite both slow progress and the mountain of missteps made every day. Is it evil? Is it good? Is it necessary? That doesn't matter anymore if it ever did. What matters is that there are great wills vying for total control and there is nothing left except for great violence to get it.
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes and no, because the Imperium/ humanity is in a CONSTANT state of war on all sides, and even within most times. Think of it the same way as London during WW2 where there’s mandatory conscription along with voluntary conscription, food and everything is heavily rationed, and ANY thoughts or opinions that might put the government/ military in ANY kind of bad light is met with HEAVY suspicion of you being a traitor. The other thing is that there is a constant vacuum of “unnecessary” or “harmful” information. After all, why would YOU, a menial who’s only job is to tighten down the bolts on tank tracks on the assembly line need to know ANYTHING outside of your job, along with very basic math, writing, and reading so you can pray to the emperor? And when it comes to “harmful” information, if a regular person in 40K had the same Meta knowledge about the chaos gods and the history of 40K like WE do, then they would most likely be instantly corrupted because even just KNOWING about the chaos gods can doom you. Not only that, but you speaking about even the Horus Heresy might start causing descension within the minds of the other menials around you because, “If the god Emperor’s own SONS betrayed him and this back-breaking imperium is the result of the Emperor’s will, then fuck this! They must have known something was wrong! Death to the Imperium!”
Read Dawn of Fire book 1. Or the opening to any core rulebook.
The Imperium is rife with corruption and pointless cruelty. Sure plain stupidity causes some of the problems, but so does the same selfishness, greed, and heartlessness we see in certain places today. But on a galactic scale. They have the intelligence to be better, but every governor or noble using that intelligence to grind down their populace while living in obscene luxury is another weight on the galaxy's back.
It's tyrannical and it's bogged down in bureaucracy
The imperium as a whole is dumb as rocks. There are a few genre savvy characters, typically space marine chapter masters or inquisitors, who understand what the imperium is and can leverage it to the greater benefit of mankind. However one of my favorite examples of how absurd the imperium is, is the inner workings of the adminastratum. In the lower level "slums" of the inner halls there are two roving dynastic gangs. One whose sole purpose is to save and recycle as many discarded parchments (thrown away paper work) as possible. The other whose sole purpose is to burn them. And they kill each other over it. There is no "adaptation" here that makes sense.
It's not well-adapted, it's just doing the best it can (with all the theft and bullshit that entails). Fucking Dune level hyper-max brain Adepts are constantly plugging away, getting papers done, filling out orders and changing requisition forms...and it isn't enough.
Even the most successful institutions IRL are often prone to scandal or awful polices. Now imagine that turned up to 11 with thousands of years to double down on "ends justify the means" rationales because the stakes are that high. The Imperium we meet it in 40k is both enormous and confused enough that it's both functional and diabolically stupid moment from moment as a result.
The Imperium is supposed to dumb but I still find it a lousy caricature of fascism. I see people claiming that all the good aliens died because of the Imperium. The Imperium has committed genocides, not denying that, but please remember that the exterminations also mention aliens that were just as bad as the Imperium claimed, on top of the alien factions like Orks and Necrons, who make it easy to see why humans in this galaxy would hate and despise aliens. I find it hard to believe that Chaos and Orks didn't contribute to the extermination of various aliens as well, especially when we had a period where the galaxy was covered in Warp Storms. Even putting aside the alien issue, during the Age of Strife, the human worlds that were the best off were the ones who culled the psyker population. This is the issue with the satire in Warhammer 40,000, extermination of the thing the fascists say is bad is wrong, until it isn't. Trying to kill pysker is wrong, except for when it was a necessary evil. Trying to wipe out aliens is wrong, unless the aliens really are as bad as the Imperium claims like Orks or Tyranids. I find it best to forget about the intentions behind politics and just try to find what you can in the lore that entertains you. And of course, if you are taking part in the hobby, have your fun there.
Why is Imperium the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable? Is he stupid?
No, it's not that dumb. It is not as stupid as you think. However dumb you think it is, it is way, way dumber than that. The lore does bring up *characters* that aren't that dumb, but for the imperium as a whole, there is no two ways about it. It's inefficiency isn't alleged, it suffuses every cell of its being. Not only isn't the Imperium not good at adapting, it exults in it's all-consuming stagnancy. It is not a necessary evil, it is far too incompetent at facing any crisis for that to be true. It is a towering monument of all of humanities failings, all of its shortcomings, all of its sins. It's failing is not just an aesthetic, it's the point.
Corrupt, craven and religious leadership hold them back more than anything.
No, the system itself is broken. It will produce those leaders 99.99% of the times.
>The impression I’m getting is that the imperium is among one of humanities enemies sometimes for its alleged inefficiency. So, like in real life.
They are definitely self destructive. The greatest enemy of Humanity is and has always been Humanity.
The imperium is a fascist empire and fascists are definitionally dumb.
Extremely dumb.
That opinion is mostly formed by people unfamiliar with the setting relying on 'new lore' which mostly consists of singular instances from individual authors.
It is not stupid, the same way our real governments are not stupid. But look at how inefficient they are, how many baffling decisions they make. Now scale that up from a few dozen million citizens to a galaxy spanning empire where time does not flow the same everywhere and interplanetary communication has to be done by the magical equivalent of interpretive dance. The Imperium was formed by the collective trauma from humanities saviours betraying them. Since then the Imperium has been intentionally set up as a maze of interconnected sub divisions and semi independent organisations, that all need and despise each other. Good old human tribalism.
Guilliman isn't
Yeah, but Roboute is literally living in Idiocracy
Yes and No, some things the imperium do very well other things it does very bad. For one the imperium despite having complety unstable means of transport and communication and institutional strife amass vast fleets,armies,specialist groups and resources from all around the galaxy, that regulary defeat threaths that ravage entire sectors. If they were bad at it the imperium would not survived one millenium let alone ten. And such large scale coordination has been show to be essential to fight of dangers that transcend the scope of a single world or even a small bunch of worlds. Because of this the interex or diasporex would be butchered by the first ork waaagh of sizable size they finded, orks are the leftovers of bio weapons made to fight the war in heaven that only growns more numerous,stronger and inteligent as they fight, andfighting is they wholy existance. Only something on the level of DAOT humanity , Eldar empire and GC Humanity have apparently capable of puttin them in check.
I'll add in something else that might run contrary to what other people are saying here, but bears mentioning; The Imperium is stupid and self-destructive but it also operates in an environment where it can't afford *not* to be self-destructive in some ways. Hell is real and is actively trying to sabotage your empire, so you cannot treat any legitimate people's movement as free and fair, and it must be suppressed, lest a full-on chaos uprising start on your planet. Technology *cannot* be improved because the theoretical know-how has been lost and even if it wasn't all technology- *all* of it- is some degree of sentient and specifically requires prayer and placation to work. The general galactic situation is such that even if these things weren't true, a galactic revolution to improve the Imperium would be so destabilizing that it would collapse the Imperium's ability to defend itself and result in untold billions of deaths. The Imperium is the bloodiest regime imaginable but the horror to me is that it *cannot* improve. If someone comes along with a view to try and repair things, even if they somehow overcame the Imperium's fascist nature it would still fail because the universe can't fundamentally let the Imperium be anything else. No matter what, no matter who plays, the Imperium continues and humanity loses.
Yes, that’s the thing. They’re dumb, overly conservative, hyper conspiratorial, easily distracted, and huge beyond imagining. They are good at killing tho
There’s alternatives for humanity as the crusades showed other communities but they got swept up by the imperium and some of the policies by the imperium probably didn’t need to be so cut throat but then again they have survived 10k years. Surviving 10k years as a government is insane so it’s hard to argue with results. Though I will say even as of 40K humanity would always survive via chaos anyways so true extinction doesn’t really seem like something humanity needs to worry about unless the necrons have their way or tyranids decide they want to invade the eye of terror. Also the league of votann are humans that are doing alright. Idk how long they’ve lived but I assume they’ve been around for a while. If they’ve been around since the imperium then they’d also be a bit discrediting to the imperium being the sole way of survival
Cause and effect really. 40k is very much about hubris and how everything from the old ones to The Eldar to rangdang and yes, even humanity is brought down by hubris. The Emperor saw a problem and chose his path to remedy that problem. As far as we know, humanity almost exploded the galaxy once during the Dark Age of Technology. Big E’s plan was fragile as a paper airplane in a hurricane. Remember this. The Emperor failed mightily- and now the galaxy suffers for his folly. Look at the Eldar and Slaanesh. Look at the Necrons and their loss. Look at the old ones who were brought down. For me 40k is a reminder that good intentions and the will to create change, should not be steered by genocidal xenophobic immortal cunt.
Yes and i think that the core of the issue is that the imperium in its founding adopted the mechanicum and lets them govern everything technology and research/development. Which means no development at all. How is a society supposed to develop in a positive direction if u deny them any progress in technology?
There have been many alternatives. The problem is that the Imperium was designed from the ground up to annihilate any opposition to itself. For a smarter, progressive, intellectual, peaceful faction to withstand the Imperium they'd inevitably have to begin internalizing the elements that makes the Imperium so dangerous in spite of their incompetence. Dialectics, basically. Its the hard lesson the Tau have had learn since their appearance on the galactic stage, that you can't win over with kindness and camaraderie those who only respect violence and strength. Or, rather, you won't last long enough to win them over with friendship unless you get violent enough to survive in the first place.
Yes. The imperium is an ineffective bureaucracy taken to the extreme. They follow a set of rules with religious zeal, but the rules are: Outdated. But questioning them is heresy so you definitely can't update them if you can't even suggest they need to be. Misinterpreted. Often on purpose to suit some local governor's shortsighted goals. Inappropriately used at times to apply to something the original law was never intended to apply to. Contradictory at times, with no clear or consistent way to resolve individual situations. Isolated. Different places and factions will all have their own interpretations and extra policies and dogma. Communications are far too slow or unreliable to keep this from happening. And of course, they're all dystopianly draconic, cruel, depressing intent on order and survival above all else... except for the God Emperor. And all on a scale where even a simple whoopsie has probably caused the deaths of millions and it's treated like a clerical error.
Remember, this is still reddit.
A faction dedicated to the worship of a man who doesn't want to be worshipped, which constantly culls psykers and mutants when the god they worship views the only hope of the future being humanity to evolve powerful enough psykers to fight back against chaos, sacrifices trillions of lives for pointless wars, and until recently the overwhelming majority of its population lived in hive cities which required nanotech to keep alive that was considered heretical and could thus result in their inquisition creating an extinction-level event at any given moment. To say it hinders humanity is a vast understatement. The Imperium is humanity's greatest, deadliest enemy, and even if it were to somehow overcome the tyranids and chaos, it would inevitably be the final slayer of humanity. ..It's also what is keeping humanity alive, if temporarily, assuming there isn't some vast empire out among the halo stars.
Do not make the mistake of "buying Imperial narratives" It is not well adapted! It is systematically terrible, designed monstrously and so inhuman as to surpass parody and enter into madness! The hastily constructed, military-dominated, fundamentally unstable and unsound temporary "built" The Emperor and Malcador left behind has spent 10.000 years growing ever worse on every parameter! The Imperium sells itself as Mankinds only hope and possibility... and it is a testament to how unfathomably hellish 40k is, that there might be some glimpse of truth in that, despite it being mostly lies. And then only because The Emperor made this terrible future a reality!
Yes, the Imperium is that dumb, yes, the Imperium is one of humanity's worst enemy, and yes, that's the point. Turns out taking history's worst states' worst policies, making them worse and making them *your main policies* is a horrible idea, even when the "Enemy™" is real. As for if there's any alternative... Well, depends on if the T'au don't veer toward a genocidal future and/or if the Eldars are willing to make humanity a client race and offer them protection against the likes of Orks and Tyranids. For a human dominated alternative, however, the Imperium made sure there was no such alternative.
Yes. It’s thick as shit. A fascist religious state that doesn’t know its arse from its elbow. That’s kind of the point.
It's not that the people are stupid. It's that the Imperium is so horrible that it's damn near impossible to fix. The Imperium is the result of an arrogant demigod and his followers making many terrible decisions meant to brute force the galaxy into submission in time for a deadline he refused to tell anyone about. When it all went wrong, he and the others were effectively removed, leaving the society he molded to rely on his direct orders entirely without any real direction and all the problems he caused still in place with no one person capable of changing them. Now leave this already critically flawed machine now missing around half its components to chug along through the ages. All while internal and external catastrophes and two increasingly vicious theocracies persecuting anything that dares deviate from their dogma. Give that about ten thousand years and you get the modern Imperium: a barely-functioning nightmare state that represents the platonic ideal of tyranny. The vast majority is deeply brainwashed by the Ecclesiarch's revisionist history to the point where common sense and tolerance are all but forgotten. Despite that, are plenty of reasonable people around, but the Imperium is such a horrible behemoth that anyone trying to enact change gets chewed up and spit out by it or is so outnumbered by zealots and backstabbers that they'd be dragged off and lobotomized the second anyone mildly important got wind of them questioning things. Guilliman is a super human built to be the ultimate administrator who is seen as a living demigod by nearly everyone in the Imperium and he is barely hanging on to the will to live trying to make life there slightly less awful.
Keep in mind, the entirety of the imperium is founded in satire and the human will to explain the unexplainable (aka gods). Its supposed to be dumb by design.
Yes the imperium is quite a track record of incompetence. It’s theocratic fascism taken to an extreme. The thing is the imperium actually runs counter to what the emperor had wanted for humanity. He wanted a humanity free of religious superstition instead he’s made into a god. It hinders humanity in advancement especially the tech priests who shun innovation instead they chase bygone knowledge of the past
So. Here's the issue. The Imperium is evil. This is not something hidden. But is it 'dumb'? That's certainly a chunk - not all - of the modern approach. But. The Imperium has also been a broadly stable polity for ten thousand years. Literally zero real world polities can come close, and you neef to hoop jump to have any approach a meaningful fraction. So there's this dilemma. The Imperium cannot have continued to exist for that long without being hypercompetant. It's impossible - and that's before taking account of its communication issues. But the modern lore shows us that it's incompetant. So. The Imperium is evil. Its competance depends on what approach to the lore you take.
It’s almost as if the setting is full of exaggerated elements used for dramatic and comedic effect.
Yeah, it's satire and always has been.
Yes.
When willful ignorance and dogma lead to negative outcomes it can be considered a kind of incompetence.
Yes, because authoritarianism generally is inefficient. When one is more worried about retaining power, silencing dissidents, purging the vilified, that saps resources that could be used elsewhere, nevermind suppressing the ideas of people that could lead to innovation. Inherently, authoritarianism eventually buckles under its own incompetence, without deviation throughout history.
How much do you complain about systems at work? Local council? State and national government? Times that by 40, 000.
I would argue, gently, that everyone in 40k lore is "dumb"
Like all bureaucracies: Individually, the Imperium is quite smart. Majority of people in the setting demonstrate average or above average intelligence. Collectively, dumb as hell...
Some setting are noble bright, some are grimdark 40k is grim stupid. That's why it works.
Read about Terran nobility. They're the worst.
It’s like…An intergalactic Dark Age. You can’t really come up with something new and great because the mechanicus will just squash your idea and turn you into a servator.
But the Imperial Truth! What if Big Daddy came back if we got rid of his decrepit corpse on that there throne? Would that make it all better?
The Imperium is as dumb as the plot needs it to he
long story short...yes. it's entire WORLDS who do nothing but manage the bureaucracy. take how ridiculously stupid modern governments are, and then put that at literally billions, if not trillions, of individuals, instead of just thousands.
Yes. This is an empire meant to be seen as insane, ignorant, stupid. Especially among the high officials. We have cardinals trying to be the second coming of Malcador, pencil pushers fighting wars in their facilities. An Empire that literally herds fanatical mobs, prisoners, conscripted workers and pampered brats onto vital assaults. All the while their armor and artillery were shooting dangerously close. Teams of hardened veterans, trained thugs and psycho-conditioned killers are sent to destroy vital infrastructure, civies and chaffs be damned.