this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
81 points (100.0% liked)
Games
21199 readers
240 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review. :silly-liberator:
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Imperium is the EU: a mostly loose federation of varied individual states that exists to enshrine a few very specific rules or principles in its members, and despite the brutal, racist, authoritarian, and inequitable structures of its component states it's continuously threatened by outbreaks of even worse and even more Fascist movements internally. That's right, the Imperium are libs.
The difference is the Imperium comes down extremely hard on those even-more-Fascist movements since they do things like intentionally spread virulent plagues or turn societies into autocannibalistic bloodbaths and it makes literal daemons manifest to wreck shit up, instead of just clutching pearls while working with the little uwu smol bean nazis and antivaxxers.
It really is a funny consequence of the setting's creators really pulling their punches and not understanding scale that the Imperium comes across as less evil than real institutions they're supposed to be satirizing and it's "there is only war" setting is much more peaceful than the real world. Like their literal death cult religion has nothing on Evangelicals, and their whole paranoia and brutal suppression shit is targeted at and done in response to these arch-reactionary might-makes-right cultists that line up exactly with real-world reactionary movements whether that's the RFK style anti-vaxxer nurglites, silicon valley libertines, the segment of vulgar fascists who are just out to self-actualize through random acts of violence to feel like big strong manly warriors, and the entire political consultant class as a whole. Like it's barely a joke to say the Imperium is more moderate on how to deal with those sorts of destructive reactionaries than a lot of people here are, because the Imperium are still fucking libs.
To put it another way, the Imperium are cartoon villains who formed in the crucible of the darker-and-edgier pop culture movement of the 80s and 90s, as written by people who don't really get that real world powers are even bigger and more awful cartoon villains underneath their human masks. So they do the silly bad guy stuff but it's all too sterile, and it lacks the real anger and fear and depravity of real world reactionaries who also do all the silly cartoon bad guy stuff but even more so.
Imperium kills 1000 people per day to maintain galactic scale transport network.
USA killed more than 1000 people per day by covid to maintain arbitrary line going up and feed 10 billionaires on top.
And the sacrificed psykers are the unstable ones who could literally explode into a pile of daemons at any second. The psykers who are stable enough to not explode get trained to be interstellar telephone operators or to sit in a big circle thinking of good vibes to try to counteract all the bad and discordant vibes that occur from billions of residents of a megacity going about their chaotic daily lives, in order to stop literally hell from manifesting into reality from there being too many bad vibes around (this is literally canon, I think it got mentioned in a Dan Abnett book though I can't remember which one).
Like it's definitely a cruel and unfair system and the cruelty psykers experience is shitty, but at the same time I don't really know what the actual correct way to deal with "this person literally warps reality around themself and can become a portal to literal hell if they fuck up even a little" would be. There's actually Psyker dialogue in Darktide where one of them is literally asked "You're not gonna explode, are you?" and just giving this earnest response that was something like "I certainly hope not, but you never can tell." "That's not very reassuring." "Tell me about it, it scares me too.", which I think is the bluntest and most personal I've ever seen 40k writing get about that problem.
This interpretation is so on point that even the franchise's only canon example of a socialist polity (Gothrul's Needle) is meet with Jakarta-style methods by local imperial authorities instead of what Nazis would do, which is drop Cyclonic torpedoes on a socialist Hive and kill everyone
As an aside, 40K Cybersyn is one of the funniest pieces of lore I've ever come across
Spidersyn