40K: Satire or not Satire

Is Warhammer 40k a satire, or not?

  • Warhammer 40K is a satire.

    Votes: 12 100.0%
  • Warhammer 40K is not a satire.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    12
  • Poll closed .

Zhu Bajie

Member
Having had several conversations about this over the last few weeks, both here and elsewhere - and it does seem to be recurring theme in 40k fandom. I thought I'd ask to get a general sense of what people think regards Warhammer 40K and satire. I'm purposely leaving the question open whether you're considering WH40K:RT or 8th Edition or any flavour in between, and letting your definition of satire - which might include parody or farce, or might be more rigorously codified.

Feel free to expand on the comments!
 
I don't think there was any doubt (from interviews and my conversations with staff) that it was meant to at least include some satire, certainly in the beginning, there was a lot of humour written into the RT rulebook and subsequent fluff, both blatant and more subtle.

I think what did happen is that at some point after 2nd/3rd Ed 40k, (it's difficult to pin down accurately, but at some point in the 'Red Period') it sort of lost it's way a bit and became this ultra-serious almost parody of it's own original background.

What's interesting to note is that the humour and satire has returned with a vengeance in the last few years.
 

Berkut666

Member
I agree with dieselmonkey. Originally it had a large dollop of satire. However as new editions came out, the % of satire dropped to the point where now There Is Only War. And business.

I have not voted on it I am afraid due to this as the vote is if he has or not. You need to add an option for "it use to have"
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
Berkut666":2r3nx74x said:
I have not voted on it I am afraid due to this as the vote is if he has or not. You need to add an option for "it use to have"

I understand that if you just look at WH40K:RT you might come away with a different opinion to if you just look at 8th edition - and it's a fair comment that these things aren't the same. I accept that understanding satire has a lot to do with interpreting the intent of the author, but I suppose if you voted in terms of 'when you do 40k is it in a spirit of satire or not?' then the vote would reflect your understanding. Really I'm just looking for a general direction, to see which way the wind is blowing.
 

Berkut666

Member
Zhu Bajie":1kofhnm3 said:
Berkut666":1kofhnm3 said:
I have not voted on it I am afraid due to this as the vote is if he has or not. You need to add an option for "it use to have"

I understand that if you just look at WH40K:RT you might come away with a different opinion to if you just look at 8th edition - and it's a fair comment that these things aren't the same. I accept that understanding satire has a lot to do with interpreting the intent of the author, but I suppose if you voted in terms of 'when you do 40k is it in a spirit of satire or not?' then the vote would reflect your understanding. Really I'm just looking for a general direction, to see which way the wind is blowing.

Ah ok that is fair enough! And great clarification. Then in that case, its a yes. Although with that said I have not actually played WH40K since the second edition so my judgment may be clouded by the passing of many years! Very interesting topic though.
 

Orjetax

Member
Satire was obvious in RT.
2nd Ed seems - to me - to have lost the satire and focused on the dystopian background.

And it seems to me that as time went on more over the top heroics punctuated the background.

I’m not sure if satire has been woven back in. I don’t follow the current stuff much.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
It's so weird because 2nd ed has aesthetics that are so hard to take seriously.

I think 1st Ed is pretty inconsistent in that regard as from one side you have great illustrations by Will Rees and Ian Miller that absolutely ooze atmospheric humourless GRIMDARK, on the other hand there's lots of lighter or downright comedic stuff from other artists and of course stuff like Inquisitor Kenobi XD .

Personally, I was mostly interested in the darker side.
 

Scalene

Member
Early 40K certainly included humorous elements - although I don't think that humour necessarily qualifies as satire, making this a more specific question. Some bits definitely seemed to undermine and mock its own core background concepts in a satirical way. One of my favourite early 40K marine epithet was "If a job's worth doing, it's worth dying for" (sorry can't remember exact source). It makes me think of a bloodstained marine staggering back in with a pint of milk - 'we lost half the squad but we got the groceries'.

Then there's the famous Helsreach marines policing punk graffiti - looks like a reference to Monty Python's 'Romans go home', and presents the marines in a slightly absurd situation. On the one hand it gives us a desperate grim dark struggle where everything is awful, but then picks it back a bit round the edges and says "really?" Reminiscent of Spinal Tap - it almost is the thing that it parodies.

40K in any edition doesn't seem as though it's a fully realistic portrayal of this world or any other. It just doesn't work consistently enough - the endless war, the techno-barbarism, the close quarters combat. I don't think this is a convincing universe - they fight in a way that is basically early 20th century, and already we are seeing the first signs of weapons that make this completely obsolete. Drones and smart stand-off weapons will soon dominate. Even when it was written 30 years ago, the internal contradictions must have been obvious.

I lost track of 40K when 2nd edition came out so I can't comment much on what happened in later editions, but my understanding is that it became increasingly straight and humourless. If that's the case then I don't think that rules out satire. The Starship Troopers film is a satire, but one so deadpan that many people don't read it as such. Can it work on two levels - both a straight representation of grim heroics, but also one that gives a knowing wink to its audience? It feels as though as GW increasingly invested in the IP and fleshed out the background, the suggestion that it was on one level all a bit silly became too subversive, or perhaps the perspective of those working on it changed; they forgot the antecedents such as 2000AD's Torquemada and started to believe that having an organisation called the "Inquisition" was a proper, normal thing to put in your fictional world.
 
I have read more of the Rogue Trader book than any other version of Warhammer 40K, and while much of it comes across at first glance as a grim, dystopian nightmare science-fiction setting, there is certainly a lot of "dark humour" and I dare say cultural/political satire present. There's probably enough to suggest that 40K began with a deep satirical undertone, even if it wasn't intended to be one big satire in its entirety. I'd also suggest there's a lot more satire that can be "read into" it than perhaps was originally intended by the authors, but I could be wrong.

I haven't followed the history of 40K in great detail, as it never interested me as much as Fantasy, but I remember there being all kinds of "British humour" going on, even in the late 90s, in the White Dwarf articles that I read. In particular I remember how one of the gangs from the Necromunda expansion had names which were crude imitations of Native American ones, such as "Dripping Pipe" or "Rusty Fence" etc. Something you'd be unlikely to see in print nowadays, I imagine, in our very PC-sensitive climate.

I lost interest in Warhammer entirely at the very tail end of the 90s (probably due to a series of nervous breakdowns which I seem to remember, at the time, as partially attributing to my interest in Warhammer, weirdly). But when I regained interest in it all about 7 years ago now, judging by the more recent marketing and artwork I've seen, there is far less humour present now and way more of an impression that 40K is supposed to be regarded as a major culturally and commercially important science-fantasy setting that ought to be taken as seriously as, for example, Star Wars.
 
AGain, anothe rexample of old satire that becomes po faced idocy is the Dark Angels.

Dark Angel is a poem by Lionel Johnson. It is a very steamy poem about "the love that shall not speak its name", ie homosexuality in a time when it was a capital offence. SO a dark secret.

THe Dark Angel's primarch is Lion El Johnson and all throughout the fluff there is reference to thier dark secret.

THis is unambiguosly satire. Its a direct reference to homosexuality. I spoke to Rick obut it and he admires the poetry and the name just fits. SO its very much satirical: are the Dark Angels marines LGBT? What does that mean? Its social commentry.

IN later editions it has been kept up, but without the knowledge of many. I for one think that the Dark Angels are a great image if takes as representing LGBT in wargaming: They are not pink and fabulous, they are tough and dark. Its somehting that GW could have kept up as a way for LGBT players to express themselves and could have been a great "secret" way to say a player is gay.

Hmm, well I dont know, but its a good illustration of how the satire is lost.
 
ramshackle_curtis":2i4ngjir said:
AGain, anothe rexample of old satire that becomes po faced idocy is the Dark Angels.

Dark Angel is a poem by Lionel Johnson. It is a very steamy poem about "the love that shall not speak its name", ie homosexuality in a time when it was a capital offence. SO a dark secret.

THe Dark Angel's primarch is Lion El Johnson and all throughout the fluff there is reference to thier dark secret.

THis is unambiguosly satire. Its a direct reference to homosexuality. I spoke to Rick obut it and he admires the poetry and the name just fits. SO its very much satirical: are the Dark Angels marines LGBT? What does that mean? Its social commentry.

IN later editions it has been kept up, but without the knowledge of many. I for one think that the Dark Angels are a great image if takes as representing LGBT in wargaming: They are not pink and fabulous, they are tough and dark. Its somehting that GW could have kept up as a way for LGBT players to express themselves and could have been a great "secret" way to say a player is gay.

Hmm, well I dont know, but its a good illustration of how the satire is lost.

I think that's probably one of the best instances of satire in the entire background, moreso as it's never been unambiguously explained and so it's completely missed by so many people.

Personally I think it's brilliantly subversive, especially considering the demographic that is/was the stereotypical Warhammer player, basically spotty adolescent males who tended to use the word 'gay' as an insult.
 

Orjetax

Member
That’s also interesting in that it evokes examples of historical warrior monks who had gay sex or were “accused” of doing so, like members of the Knights Templar were.

4114ba7669516df1b1f600f2740d9a3c.jpg
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
I also posed the same question in two other places, one the blasted grimdark hellscape that is Twitter and the other in the labyrinthine backwater on the outer rim of the universe that is the Miniatures Gaming group on Google Plus. The results were interesting (?) even tho the sample size is quite small (approximately 100 respondents in total).

Twitter: 60% is satire / 40% is not
G+ : 77% is satire / 23% is not
Here: 100% is satire / 0% is not

We have to allow that different interpretations of the word 'satire' are in play, and that there will be those with a nuanced understanding of the term who might find 40k falling short, so not considering it satire, where others may use the word in a much looser sense. A brief review of fannish commentary on 40K satire shows generally a looser rather than more technical understanding is dominant - and may well cover aspects that we would technically define as parody or farce.

We also have to that “not satire” covers everything from ’attempts to be satire, but fails’ through to ‘this is to be taken seriously’.

We also have to accept that it is unlikely that any responders have a perfect view of the entire body of work - there have been 8 editions of the game over 30+ years and hundreds of novels and so the responses inevitably reflect personal understanding and experiences, rather than some kind of omniscient detached view, but this is only to be expected, and personal responses are what the question was seeking.

One of the motivators for posting was a brief exchange with Gav Thorpe - who quite rightly I think, highlighted a fallacy of composition as the main reason for divergent views on 40K, just as it’s equally possible for someone to cherry pick details in order to make a case and ignore anything contrary. Just as one example - that Space Marines always win The Battle at the Farm, one would think, based on this evidence that the Imperium naturally should win all their conflicts, and therefore be an optimally engineered military machine, whereas in essence, BatF is a freak occurrence in a massive sea of data of continual failure and decline (after all, a Home Planet of the greatest star-warriors to ever sail the space between stars has just been trashed by a bunch of green monkey men flying through space on a brick).

Numerous commentators across all platforms mention that 40K used to be satire in the past, but now isn't - with various points in time for marking that change, some claiming the change came straight after Rogue Trader , and others at the end of 2nd Ed - but certainly no edition later than that was cited.

There is also the fact that the results of the poll is publicly viewable and we have to consider that individuals may be voting in bad faith for entirely performative and socially cohesive reasons. Some pro-Satire commentators attempted to ridicule the opposing view as stupid, and some anti-Satire commentators attempted to refute the validity of the question, as if it was somehow intended to give a single definitive answer - a lack of understanding that in itself is interesting. As a counterpoint, imagine asking if Star Trek is satire and seeing how the results split.

So what does it all mean. I think there are essentially 3 positions.

1. 40K is intended to be satire and 1/3rd of the audience don’t get it.
2. 40K is intended to be serious and 2/3rd of the audience treat it as a joke.
3. 40k is intentionally ambiguous towards satire / fails to communicate it's satirical intent.

Satire is defined by intent. If satire can be misread as not-satire, then it falls into the trap of glorifying rather than critiqing its subject.

tumblr_mkugbrcNip1qbfdqyo1_1280.jpg


I think the Lyyn Elgonsen / Lionel Johnsen, Dark Angels meme is a case in point. What is this supposed to be satirising?, Nothing wrong with having legions of grizzly gay space men based on historical warrior fraternities - but coding it as shameful secret in a way that doesn't ridicule the shame or secrecy means it misses its pointedness as satire, and it just becomes a bit of a weak pun.

Rogue Trader also has the Dark Angels holding blood drinking ceremony - The Feast of Malediction - (RT: p138/139) which seem like a parody of the Eucharist, in a schlocky hammer horror, vampire pseudosatanic kind of way, and maybe echoes of Johnsens poem Vinum Daemonum. We get this idea of a gothy debased-religiousity, superstitious rather than rational space empire, but it all seems to add up to very little.
 
Zhu Bajie":3oyt3479 said:
One of the motivators for posting was a brief exchange with Gav Thorpe - who quite rightly I think, highlighted a fallacy of composition as the main reason for divergent views on 40K, just as it’s equally possible for someone to cherry pick details in order to make a case and ignore anything contrary. Just as one example - that Space Marines always win The Battle at the Farm, one would think, based on this evidence that the Imperium naturally should win all their conflicts, and therefore be an optimally engineered military machine, whereas in essence, BatF is a freak occurrence in a massive sea of data of continual failure and decline (after all, a Home Planet of the greatest star-warriors to ever sail the space between stars has just been trashed by a bunch of green monkey men flying through space on a brick).
BatF was a freak occurrence because the Crimson Fists fortress monastery was destroyed by a malfunctioning anti-ship missile hitting ammo stores.
Ork space hulks weren't a thing in the rulebook. Orks had ordinary spaceships and almost exclusively used Imperial STC-based technology with some Orkish flavour.
And since huge starships weren't a thing either, they probably wouldn't even be able to bring sufficient numbers to be able to fight a whole Space Marine chapter.

Zhu Bajie":3oyt3479 said:
Numerous commentators across all platforms mention that 40K used to be satire in the past, but now isn't - with various points in time for marking that change, some claiming the change came straight after Rogue Trader , and others at the end of 2nd Ed - but certainly no edition later than that was cited.

There is also the fact that the results of the poll is publicly viewable and we have to consider that individuals may be voting in bad faith for entirely performative and socially cohesive reasons. Some pro-Satire commentators attempted to ridicule the opposing view as stupid, and some anti-Satire commentators attempted to refute the validity of the question, as if it was somehow intended to give a single definitive answer - a lack of understanding that in itself is interesting. As a counterpoint, imagine asking if Star Trek is satire and seeing how the results split.

So what does it all mean. I think there are essentially 3 positions.

1. 40K is intended to be satire and 1/3rd of the audience don’t get it.
2. 40K is intended to be serious and 2/3rd of the audience treat it as a joke.
3. 40k is intentionally ambiguous towards satire / fails to communicate it's satirical intent.

Satire is defined by intent. If satire can be misread as not-satire, then it falls into the trap of glorifying rather than critiqing its subject.

tumblr_mkugbrcNip1qbfdqyo1_1280.jpg


I think the Lyyn Elgonsen / Lionel Johnsen, Dark Angels meme is a case in point. What is this supposed to be satirising?, Nothing wrong with having legions of grizzly gay space men based on historical warrior fraternities - but coding it as shameful secret in a way that doesn't ridicule the shame or secrecy means it misses its pointedness as satire, and it just becomes a bit of a weak pun.

Rogue Trader also has the Dark Angels holding blood drinking ceremony - The Feast of Malediction - (RT: p138/139) which seem like a parody of the Eucharist, in a schlocky hammer horror, vampire pseudosatanic kind of way, and maybe echoes of Johnsens poem Vinum Daemonum. We get this idea of a gothy debased-religiousity, superstitious rather than rational space empire, but it all seems to add up to very little.
I think it's 3. Wh40k started out pretty much as a weak satire for adults, with some artists not getting the memo and taking it entirely seriously and quickly turned into fascist propaganda for kids.
 
Scalene":24rsvw42 said:
Then there's the famous Helsreach marines policing punk graffiti - looks like a reference to Monty Python's 'Romans go home', and presents the marines in a slightly absurd situation.
I don't think you understand the 'Romans go home' scene, then. It was absurd because the protagonist expected to be imprisoned and tortured as a resistance member and the legionaire was behaving like a sadistic teacher instead.

Also, the graffiti is "Marines ou". Here is an oddly similar graffiti.

Elite troops harassing people not wanting them around? Totally never happened and completely absurd.

Another important detail - the "punk" is probably a ganger or a mercenary. He's huge, is armed with a handgun and he has haircut like bandits and mercenaries - street punks of hellsreach have completely different haircuts and don't have firearms and are rather soft when compared to other characters shown.
 
Personally I do not have a problem with the ambiguity. I dont see it as the responsibility of games designers to condemn or critique everything that is bad, or to consistently conform to this or that. As long as the game is fun and they are not actually starting a war, I dont care that war is simply portrayed without a consistently critical commentary. Indeed, if they were constantly pushing an agenda, even if it were one I agreed with, this would be irritating because its just a game.
 
"A Home Planet of the greatest star-warriors to ever sail the space between stars has just been trashed by a bunch of green monkey men flying through space on a brick..."

Elevator pitch for Rogue Trader: The Movie
 

Late

Member
AranaszarSzuur":1f9qq6e5 said:
Wh40k started out pretty much as a weak satire for adults, with some artists not getting the memo and taking it entirely seriously and quickly turned into fascist propaganda for kids.

Yeah right. Please save all of the SJW crap for Fecesbook, thank you.
 
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