I'll be honest, I thought this was gonna be a thoughtless rage-bait click getter. Instead, it was a fascinating examination of what a Space Marine really is, through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. I'm glad I read that.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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I agree. I only have shallow knowledge of 40k, but the exploration of the history around the universe was very fascinating. I also think it's interesting that this issue seems to occur with satire, particularly when involving fascism. It brings to mind starship troopers and the more recent helldivers, how so many miss the point. I can't help but feel the glorification of the military and military service in many of today's societies lends itself to this problem. The military is inherently authoritarian, against diversity (including diversity of thought), and intentionally dehumanizes "the enemy" (turns out, it isn't easy to kill people). Couple this with an image of masculinity that centers around adversity at best, and violence at worst along with so many men who feel they have missed opportunities to meet this standard and you have a recipe for fascists. How do we address this within our society? I don't have the answers, but we should all be thinking about it.
Hollis-Leick and narrative director Craig Sherman pushed back on some of the "do's and don'ts" they received from Games Workshop about Space Marine vocabulary. They deviated from the suggested phraseology to make Titus and his comrades sound less "strange and antiquated", less like the Spanish Inquisition, and more like soldiers from real-world present-day militaries. "Space Marines don't necessarily say things like 'dismissed'," Hollis-Leick observed. "There's a line in the game where Acheran says 'company dismissed' and they really wanted me to change that to 'brothers, attend your duties', or something. But it's three words instead of one, and if that model was applied to all of the language in the game, I really strongly felt that people wouldn't get it."
Gonna be a whole lotta really peeved 40k ultra fans....
I mean, I'm not an ultra fan, only a casual one and I dislike that. The whole over the top style of WH40k is exactly what was fascinating about it. If I want to play something with modern soldiers, I have Battlefield or Call Of Duty. I play 40k games for the absurdity of it. That's exactly the kind of "I know better what the fans want" that most bad adaptations are born out of. Luckily it seems they didn't feel the need to change too much.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don't want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don't want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
Just look at Helldiver 1/2, couldn't be more in your face about it, and yet there's still people not getting it.
Which mirrors exactly how the game's inspiration, the movie-adapation of Starship Troopers, has been misinterpreted by less observant viewers.
Touché
I formed a barometer for measuring comedy and it's perceived ripple effect on society. Look at the comedy piece, the joke, the theme as a whole, whichever element, and then ask - does it highlight the issue, or does it perpetuate it? It may be the case that the intention of the piece to be a commentary denigrating fascism, but if it does a poor job conveying that message it might just look like an over-the-top approval of it.
An example of this that hit me close to was for It's Always Sunny during 2016, the insane "I can do whatever I want" antics that some Americans were replicating was seemingly getting higher and the crossover between people quoting the show in the wrong ways just made me realize that maybe the show hadn't done a good enough job presenting itself to less observant viewers. Well they also felt the same way because they really ramped up the highlighting of the issues after season 12, in a way that is presented in a different fashion.
This of course, was disliked by that specific crowd - there's a few people who aren't hateful who just don't like the new presentation and that's fine (they're wrong of course! lol). It wasn't uncommon for a few years to see people rage about how the show went woke, and still happens but less often now because they all got angry and dropped the show (Newsflash asshole, they were talking about you the whole goddamn time!).
Anyway, as mentioned with Starship Troopers, this happens with a lot of popular media in the conservative sphere, as can be seen with Idiocracy. There's a ton of other examples too, but we're all aware of how often this occurs.
The Boys comes to mind, even though this show is hardly subtle. One has to wonder if at least some far-right demagogues are fully aware of this and are actually doing it as a form of cultural appropriation.
The Boys is a good one, and an interesting one specifically because it plays to the StarWars-Imperialist / DC-Marvel-Authoritarian types. Garth Ennis, who wrote for The Punisher comics and of course, The Boys, is vehemently anti-everything that these types of authoritarians stand for.
Yet despite his hatred of them, he writes them exceptionally well in a way that is lost on the less observant viewers (man I just love that phrase lol). The people who love the Punisher for the wrong reasons are the very same people who love The Boys for the wrong reasons, it's actually crazy how much crossover there is between the two pieces.
I think The Boys (show) also played up this aspect as a way to vilify power seeking behavior to the Conservative crowd by mocking Homelander outright, and subtly by showing the effects on The Boys (the group themselves and their struggles with power and how they use it). Very similarly to Sunny, there is a shift in the way The Boys is perceived by the conservative crowd around Season 3, as the writers were amping up their highlighting of the issues specifically because idiots were perpetuating Storm-lander's sexualization of weaponized dehumanization (i.e. getting off on Nazi romance) - in the show so much so that even Homelander was like dude that's fucked up.
The issue of course is that Homelander is justified to these idiots, so making him look silly and dumb comes to be one of the only ways that a specific demographic will understand that his actions are bad -- which of course, they get offended by and do not like, because they've wanted to emulate Homelander the whole time. Characters like the right-wing Stepdad and the Podcaster Listener at the convenience store show how an individual can fall into the cycle of hatred perpetuated by the media and the entire point is completely lost on them because Homelander lasering those liberals was exactly what he should have done.
Part of it is scary, because I don't believe it's Marvel and cartoons that are breeding this mindset. These people are conservative christians who listen to talk radio and watch the news, and they are not being inspired by characters like Homelander, they were already like this. Characters like Homelander or the Punisher are just placeholders, scapegoats, a way for these hateful individuals to self-insert themselves into media. This does not mean that the answer is culling these characters existence, but rather continuing to highlight their faults and flaws in order to re-engage people to show them what it is like to actually be a good person.
It can be pleasing to inhabit a fiction where all the pieces are smoothly bolted together, working in lockstep. But teaching people to favour the consistency of imaginary worlds may also teach them to vilify disagreement and the entire practice of interpretation.
I can sometimes feel this pressure when running a tabletop game in a big setting like 40k or Star Wars. Can't imagine how magnified that is when you're working on something thousands of people with play, let alone in a fan base with such obnoxious reactionaries in the mix
Space Marine 2 Is Too Busy Making You Feel Heroic to Show the Farce at Warhammer 40K’s Heart
I’ve long enjoyed Warhammer 40K, but so often the people who write fiction for the setting struggle to handle the black satire that sits at the heart of the setting.
The problem is there’s a non-insignificant sexist, racist, and toxic portion of the Warhammer fanbase that tend to think the Imperium is correct in its methods. Newcomers might play it and not understand what the setting is truly about.
I liked playing SM2, but they should do more against the racists fanbase.
relatively new to the 40k lore. mechanicus was my introduction, the voice acting and dialogue perfectly captured the mechanicus clan and personalities. you can feel a resemblance of humanity in their mechanoid bodies. not too familiar with space marines outside of Dawn of War and the tcg games where they are constantly shouting cliche military slogans