That rambles on way too long, but it does make a salient point: Space Marines are weird and bad, and attempts to make them just big manly fighty dudes that grunt and fight instead of weird mutant battle-nerds suck and are bad. They shouldn't be relatable, they should barely be human, and they definitely shouldn't be "wot if ur normal soldier man was big and extra fighty?"

Not least of which because Orks already fill the niche of being big silly guys that like to fight.

This is why it is neigh impossible to parody fascism while making its footsoldiers protagonists. Someone will always identify with them.

I see more ironic and comedic 40K material than I see actual 40K lore these days. Fuck I made a 40K lore joke post on here not to long ago and it was received well.

My point is, while there are actual fascists attracted to 40K lore, I think the phenomenon is overplayed more than a little. Fuck there are fascists in the My Little Pony fandom, fash dorks will latch onto anything. I think most 40K fans these days are fully aware it's tongue-and-cheek nature. I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.

I continue to have no interest in WH40k

Reposting my favorite /r/sigmarxism post because it’s mildly relevant and I still think it’s hilarious

Ugh, Warhammer is a friend’s special interest right now so I have to play this game with them so they won’t be suicidal.

That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.

Darktide is the superior Warhammer game anyways. Who needs some dumb eight foot tall nerd wearing a tank as a business suit when you can play a 5' tall woman wearing a burlap sack, with the worst haircut you've ever seen, swinging a 6' long chainsaw around, who is diegetically too angry to die?

I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that online leftists just can't help but hit a brick wall when it comes to 40k

The crux of all these satire arguments boils down to "make the satire MORE obvious, MORE cartoonish, eliminate all nuance or three dimensional character development and most importantly make it NOT FUN" and I always ask, WHY?

Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?

Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic vampires who thirst for blood and eat civilians alive before the satire becomes acceptable for high culture lefties?......OH WAIT that's literally a quarter of the space marine chapters

Subversion and nuance are fine in anti-fascist satire, you don't need to drop an anvil on the setting to get the point across

If you wanted to make them likable, they should have been Salamanders or maybe Space Wolves. But then, I guess that makes it even harder to beat someone over the head with "fascism bad".

arguing that the Imperium are the Good Guys despite the fact they are Space Fascists because The Universe Is Just That Bad

arguing the Imperium are the Good Guys because they have Space Commissars and are therefore Communists doing Galactic War Communism, being literally ruled by Psychic Lenin's Preserved Corpse after the Horus Revisionism. Space Marines are the True Volcel Vanguard.

their beef with the Tau is like a weird Sino-Soviet Split

Is good games journalism back? 👀

Shout-out to aftermath and RPS for holding it down in the meantime