Warhammer 40k Tabletop Thread XLIV - "Take a Shot of Paint Water"

[LCP]

While I can't say for certain that I disagree with any of that, I still come back to my old standby - there is NOTHING in 40k that couldn't have been solved by beating Erebus to death with the ragged end of Kor Phaeron's spinal column back in, say, M30.8.

Personally I think that's falling into the trap of believing the HH paperback mill's own hype, that all their churn of marine characters in different coloured armour are Very Important. I'd say if you go with the central narrative thrust that's been with the game from the beginning, the end of the possible happy endings for humanity is the Dark Age of Technology. The Emperor is a fascist warlord who picks up the pieces and welds them into a campaign of imperialism and genocide. His project can only end in more human misery, whether his generals stay loyal or not, whether he survives or not. Horus rebels because of Chaos, yes, but he also rebels because that's what warlords in this position do. If you believe power comes from force alone then you will never stop fighting. Chaos is just there to make the story more interesting, and tempts him with stuff that he already wants.

But yeah - the eternal stalemate between humanity and Chaos is the 'bad end', but I think my main point is that there HAS to be more than one pivotal moment, and the last one can't have been 10,000 years ago. Too many things happen to too many influential people - Guilleman, Dorn, Vandire, Lysander, Sevatar, Abaddon, to name but a few - to say that none of them have mattered since the Heresy. Always a loaded statement to say about 40k, but it just isn't logically sensible.

The interesting argument to me would be: what if there are no pivotal moments? These are histories of populations of trillions and forces of nature - what if the same outcomes would come about regardless of the names and actions of the exact characters involved with them? Sure, the specifics of how they happen might differ - but there's more than one way to skin a cat mess up your galactic empire. The history might be full of crucial battles and individuals doing significant things, but those could just be ripples on the surface of the inevitable statistical tide - if they hadn't happened that way, there would have been other pivotal moments, other vital individuals. That's not saying that individuals don't have free will, just that they don't have the power to change the fate of large populations. You can choose to swim against the tide or with it, but you won't stop it coming in.

If you take the narrative as:

• Humanity's reach exceeds its grasp; the DAOT happens.
• The traumatised survivors give in to humanity's worst tendencies, and turn to authoritarianism, xenophobia and militarism.
• That society eats itself when it runs out of external enemies, as it was always destined to do.

then I don't think there's any individual who couldn't be replaced with another individual, or whose choices couldn't be replaced with other choices, earlier or later, in the same place or elsewhere.

You can say that the Emperor kind of bucks this argument because he's such a collossally significant individual, but the Emperor is very frequently presented as a kind of avatar for the whole species - narratively, is this about his decisions, or is he a representation of the trillions of people he leads? Even with all the superpowers in the world, an individual can't do that much on the scale of the Milky Way - he depends on the vast apparatus of the Imperium to have any more impact on the wider universe than e.g. an asteroid would. Similarly, the Chaos Gods are presented as reflections and personifications of the negative tendencies of large groups of humans. They're portrayed as having agency, but not as being able to act any other way.

I'm not saying you have to interpret it this way, just saying - this is a whole debate about how to look at real-world history. The idea that you'd assume it's settled and that Great Men really do decide the course of history as part of this particular chain of reasoning, when you're trying to decide what's too silly for you in the game where space orcs with mushroom wigs fight Victorian redcoats with laser guns... it seems very back-to-front to me.