I'm in awe of how many words have been penned in support of this utterly dogshit narrative. Sure, some of the baseline concepts are cool and the atmosphere is fun, but in terms of raw storytelling and character development, this has to be the most bankrupt fictional endeavour in human history. Right now there are thousands of people worldwide reading various wikis or watching videos and viewing this completely hokum as literary. Unbelievable.
It's just a generic sci-fi pastiche setting slapped together by a miniature company to offload leftover inventory after their licenses expired. It's not like the Legendarium or anything and the fans don't pretend otherwise.
>>24840660I dunno i think its alright
its horribly boring>DUUUUDE WHAT IF SPACE BUT SUPER GRIMDARK LOL PURGE XENOS LOL PRAISE THE EMPEROR LOL
>>24840660I engage with 40K and actually, no disagreement there. WH40K is low-brow entertainment by definition. It is actually barely a narrative at all: WH40K is the fictional setting that incorporates everything your 13 year old self (if your 1 year old self was that in the beginning of the 90s or so) thought was cool. You may have memories of discussing with your childhood friends whether Darth Vader would defeat Goku or something like that. 40K is the setting that is designed from the ground up to accomodate such fantasies. That's why its narrative overall is so dogshit - there isn't really a good way to tell a coherent story when you're trying to pull in thousands of pilfered ideas from other narratives.But that also is what makes 40K good - it's basically a canvas for you to build or imagine your own story in, because you can mostly fit almost anything into it. I read decent 40K fiction - pulpy, but decent. I also read complete garbage. I played and GMed RPG modules in 40K as a setting, and similarly, some of them were fun, and some were dogshit. So to me the point is - you're not using 40K right if you're just engaging with the official plot and lore. It's there as a bare minimum justification of this all existing as a setting, it's a necessity, not the main attraction. You're supposed to make something out of it yourself, or engage with derivative works that did.
>>24840660>viewing this completely hokum as literaryNo we don't.
>>24840660It's basically one giant grimdark tribute to sci fi and fantasy in all its forms, from Moorcock to 2000AD to Heinlein
>>24840660I sort of like the Ciaphas Cain books.
>>24840740for me it's gaunts ghosts
What I don't get is why universes like this and star wars need accepted canons beyond the barebones essentials. Why you need wookiepedia articles on Sheev and fucking Gibbons "The Rise and fall of the Imperium of man", complete with the list of irrelevant battle after irrelevant battle. The fun in these settings is giving the barebones necessary to tell your own stories. Why would you ruin that with trying to establish a canon?
>>24840777this is actually a major point of controversy in the 40k community. (or it was when i last played.) many think that both the world and the backstory should have been left more open, more ambiguous, and more unexplained. for a "why", it's always just money, isn't it? you can't pump out thee hundred shitty novels about making a point of not going into detail. sure, you can still do some things, but you'll need better writers and there will be less potential for exploitation than otherwise.
>>24840792I don't mind the gorillion novels but just don't have an established canon. Just have every novel be someone's fanfiction, or let some authors do a series of fanfiction.It's not the company either, it's the nerds. These sorts of sci-fi nerds just have no aesthetic taste and are somewhat autistic. They think more autistic detail == good, and just keep on piling on the layers, and get really defensive if something contradicts a layer.
>>24840777If you're trying to tell a specific story (e.g. you're writing about a crew of a Marauder bomber), you probably want to focus on the details that are relevant to them - e.g. how their bomber functions, what are the relationships in the crew, what tasks are they given and how they react to them. But before that, you also want some source to define all the other stuff that you don't want to focus on. What war are they fighting? What is the planet like? Are the pilots able to go back home after some time? Is there something like the GI bill that one of them hopes to use? Etc. If you were writing about IRL - say, crew of the B-25 bomber in WW2 - it's easy, you open WIkipedia, you read where these bombers were used, you take your pick of a campaign that seems interesting. If you'd like inspiration of what people talked like and thought about and cared for, you just pull up contemporary sources.If you are writing about a canon-less sci-fi world where no one had done the heavy lifting of defining all that stuff for you, you need to do a lot of worldbuilding work before you have enough material to sculpt the story of your characters out of.
>>24840844Except it's fantasy and the details often don't matter. Luke Skywalker's X-wing could effortlessly fly across the entire universe at light speed because the narrative required it, you didn't need to explain how or why that fighter had a light speed drive.
>>24840844>Implying the writer of a book about a marauder pilot would bother looking up anything about it on some nerd wiki instead of just writing the book, continuity be damned
It could be interesting if you observe it as a collective work of numerous writers co-inhabiting a literary setting for decades. The works themselves span many genres and can be varied focus from the minute parts of the world to very large scale ones. The afterwords of the Siege of Terra books have every author describing the difficulty in trying to solve plot holes, avoid creating new ones, resolving character arcs and mysteries that numerous authors have been working on not just in the 50+ works of the Horus Heresy series that started in 2006, but since the start in the 80s. I don´t think there is anything else like 40k.I find the Warp the most interesting thing about 40k. It motivated me to start reading through the works of Plato so that I can someday reconcille his metaphysics and that of the Warp.So far the Phaedo dialogue has given the greatest insight that the body can corrupt the soul. Then the War In Heaven event can be attributed to polluting the universe so much that the realm of forms itself got corrutped. I have not gotten around to Timaeus yet but I think it will be critical to whether the metaphysics can be reconcilled. I might have to read some of the neoplatonists as well.
I like some of the books (such as Eisenhorn), but I've found caring about the actual progression of the timeline outside of vague markers is a fools errand. I made the mistake of listening to a few lore channels while doing chores and there's so much stupid shit it's unreal. I love the stupid shit in Metal Gear, I'm not sure why 40K lacks the charm. As a Brit some would think I should have the right psychology for it, as the setting is quintessentially a piece of British imagination. I don't know. Maybe how seriously autists take it robs it of the fun.
It sucks that the writers actively hate the material they're working on.
Picrel was really good.
I have never read a 40K book and I doubt that I will find the time to do it.But the "universe" is so inconsistent and some of the basic premises are so stupid, that it completely breaks the whole.Which is annoying, because they have stolen everything fun existing in sci-fi and space operas, and they were close (as far as I know) to putting it together well. But they had to keep pushing and now I cannot really enjoy stories in this convoluted mess.
