Everyone exists in different but somewhat overlapping cultural spaces and etc., so who knows, but I absolutely think that “Hey Jealousy” is that song more than “Creep.”

It’s kind of tough to extract, because the Imperium isn’t really “fascist” and doesn’t actually have a lot of overlap with the real-world goals of modern fascists, but they’re of the same phylum and share a lot of surface traits and the slogans all work together at a glance.

I am personally easily sold on the idea that Orks are better than human because Orks are very funny.

(well, that was, uh, long?)

It is an argument over the specifics and arrangements about the contents of a void.

This has ended up in a weird feedback loop where fans become the creators, and GW itself is necessarily attentive to fan meta-discussion, and so now this cultural football game over what the Imperium “means” is enmeshed in the setting even though the truth is that it never really “‘meant” anything.

To an extent, yeah, but I always think of this as a very fan-ish mistake, viewing “the Imperium” as a thing that needs to be rooted for or against. It’s a place and a setting and essentially the air that characters breathe. It isn’t meant to be interacted with in big idealistic terms.

It is difficult and maybe silly to think about in retrospect, but the return of actual, crushing global authoritarianism wasn’t something people worried about directly in the 80’s 90’s, and a lot of things created in that timeframe touch on those concepts in a way that seems more meaningful now.

Anyway, skip to 25+ years later, and 40K is now both

1) a huge global IP, and

2) suddenly, unpleasantly relevant in a lot of ways.

Neither of these things were supposed to happen, and both of these concepts are very often just plain orthogonal to the whole spirit it was created in.

(please enjoy the three or four sentence fragments strung together awkwardly and occasionally repetitively there, oops, gotta edit before posting…)

The “it was originally satire” thing isn’t, I think, just isn’t very strongly true. 40K has always *contained* satire, and the Imperium’s been used to express horror at brutal authoritarianism, but I don’t you can’t really look at any era of the setting’s development and say that was a big driver.

I have a lot of long thoughts on all of this, but the core thing here is that the creators of 40K weren’t interested in narratively judging the Imperium, likely because it really didn’t seem particularly relevant at the time. It was basically just a big vehicle for making fun minis and flavor text.

Roboute Guilliman torched billions on Colchis alone because the Emperor told him to. He exists to create galactic engines of order that are oiled, as needed, by human blood. Then he wakes up and is all “oh, boo-hoo, there’s purity seals, how could this happen, a-bloo a-bloo.” It’s sorta ridiculous.

I really think this doesn’t work well. It’s clearly GW trying to metanarratively say “no, no, the Imperium’s bad and we think it’s bad!” but the big differences between the imagined future of the pre-Heresy Imperium and the actual 40K Imperium boils down to “it has some religious trappings.”

This is pretty much exactly how I got a gig doing a comic strip for the student paper during college, but I figured that’s the highest you could go with that tactic.

Also: Nice painting!

Man, that thing is pleasant. Just a nice mini all around.

Fairly sure it was a long time before that. I read his college blog way back in at least late 2003-ish, and I think even by then he was already against it in retrospect.

Might be misremembering something from over twenty years back, but I strongly recall him having already turned against the war *way* before he had any kind of major public profile?

Helen of Troy looking like Lupita Nyong'o is incredibly unlikely, would require a black swan event

Yup!

The manager then took me aside to ask if I was threatening him by walking out with you to your car.

Remember how there was a entire management position that existed specifically just so what happened to you wouldn’t happen, and yet

God, that whole saga. That whole fucking *place*.

It does also have some reprises that likely don’t reflect well on it by inevitable comparisons. “Buried in the Red” is not “The Hounds,” or anything near it. “Light’s Last Stand” doesn’t approach “Will of One,” tho I have come to love how gonzo it is within the context of their catalogue.

I dunno, think there’s some (“Hold Back the Night” has been out for like ten years and still gets stuck in my head), but Act III is definitely focused on the Rock Opera side of things. I’m real curious what Act III pt2 is gonna be like, in that sense.

Huh! Most everyone I know who likes Protomen stuff loved it.

(I’m included, here, tho I think it gets notably weaker in the second half)

Don’t know this for sure, but It sorta seems like the commercial success of the Garfield collections created a boom for comic strip collections in general? They existed before, but I don't think they were as widespread, comprehensive or regularly-released until the 80’s.

Yo.

I hope you’re right. Seriously. It’s very hard for me to square that with the way police in the Twin Cities responded to Derek Chauvin’s arrest and conviction, tho.

This is true, but I honestly have trouble believing that there’s any amount of violence or law-breaking - so long as both are directed against left-coded groups - that would dim the sense of respect and camaraderie that rank-and-file cops feel towards ICE/CPB.