Hi you're cool and I don't know my words very well when speaking to people I don't know. I would be very appreciative if you could help me learn anything about The Black Library or Warhammer 40k. I know less than little about it all but it's interesting and seems fun, and based upon the fact that within like a month of catching up in homestuck you developed hella knowledge about it(Seriously, that's impressive) and Aneatria saying so, you seem the person to ask. Please and ty muchly.
Okay so basically 40k has been going on for like 25 years and has a number of different factions, and my in-depth knowledge varies a bit from faction to faction. In a real world sense, 40K began as a sci-fi spinoff of Warhammer Fantasy Battles—basically all the same stuff but IN SPAAAACE, but quickly grew to outsell WHFB and has for 20+ years. These days the only points of mythology they really have in common are the identities of the Chaos gods, but at various points it’s been speculated that the Warhammer Fantasy universe was a single planet in isolation within the 40K setting, and also that the 40K setting was basically a self-contained entity inside a jar at a wizard college. Or something.
They’ve stepped away from that.
Currently in 40K there are two product lines going: Warhammer 40,000, which takes place in the year 40,999, and includes such factions as the Space Marines, Sisters of Battle, Tau, Dark Eldar, and Tyranids, and the Horus Heresy line, which takes place 10,000 years earlier and is heavily Space Marine-oriented. The Horus Heresy was a civil war in the Imperium, where the Emperor of Mankind was rendered immobile and incommunicate by one of his favored sons and trusted generals, Horus. Horus also had eight of his brothers playing on his team, and went 9v9 with the remaining loyal brothers to determine the fate of the galaxy. The Emperor was crippled in the final battle, and Horus was killed, so most of the invading force retreated.
In 40K proper, that event was 10,000 years ago, and the Imperium has stagnated ever since, as any number of people in power want to keep things as much the same as possible in case the Emperor ever recovers to reign again. This means that innovation in technology was discouraged or sometimes outright suppressed, an Inquisition was created to root out pockets of dissent and, essentially, black magic, as well as protect the giant, stagnant imperium from alien forces, and a cult of divinity sprung up around the Emperor basically as soon as (and sometimes before) he wasn’t able to tell everyone to knock it off and stop worshipping him. That cult grew into the state religion, and failing to adhere to it is punishable by death. (The church had its own schism and civil war in the 35,000s, which was called the Age of Apostasy and totally deserves its own book series.)
The tagline for the setting is “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war!” But that’s just advertising. Honestly for most citizens of the Imperium life isn’t awful—they go to Templum service once a week and work what may or may not be a drudge job the rest of the time, and nothing truly worldshaking ever happens—but we don’t visit those worlds, for obvious reasons. All the books and video games and tabletop stuff is about worlds under threat by aliens or daemons or heretical cults, and someone from some faction shows up to deal with it.
Thematically it tends to be a lot about the slow decline of things, the high cost of victory, contrasted with stuff like camaraderie and mateship (which isn’t really a thing we have in America, but it seems to suit, in both the inclusive and exclusive senses). It’s very us vs. them, and the lengths “us” has to go to to triumph are one of the main points of differentiation from many or even most SF settings.
I’m happy to drill down and talk in detail about basically any faction or event, but hopefully that’s an informative primer to get started with!
