Ok I have Thoughts, and Takes. Warhammer 40k Thoughts and Takes.
And they're blazing hot.
Yeah, I know about the poet, and yeah I know about the gay lore but you cannot look me in the eyes and tell me that "Lion El'Johnson" is not the absolutely most ridiculous name in the whole of the franchise that gave the world gems like "Perturabo" and "Mortarion" (and Ferrus Manus and Corvus Corax, because tautology is the new black). Seriously "Lion El'Johnson" sounds like the self-insert OC of a teenage Tywin Lannister if he'd grown up reading Golden Age superhero comics.
For this, among many other reasons, I can now only imagine Lion as Charles Dance (because who do you typecast to play eternally disappointed, disapproving, hardass feudal deconstructions with a leonine theme?) A slightly de-aged, golden-maned Charles Dance. Needless to say, like all other characters of the above persuasion, Lion can absolutely get it. (Also, Lion lives in "The Rock"? They doin' it on purpose now or what?)
Speaking of ASoIaF....even though it still hurts and I'll be forever salty about us not getting of acceptable closure.....my ASoIaF garbage favourite was a pale, black-haired, vampire-themed, blood-happy, elusive bastard who had an affinity for flaying and (symbolically) wearing the skins of his enemies, not to mention being one half of a very, VERY fucked-up father-son duo. Yeah, it was Roose Bolton. What can I say, I enjoyed trying to work out wtf this guy was all about in the grand scheme. I'm super resentful I'm gonna die most likely without finding out. Sure would be weird if my new garbage favourite in the next franchise I plopped into was a pale,dark-haired,vaguely vampiric, blood-happy, crazy elusive guy who has a thing for flaying and wearing the skins of his victims while also having a horrible relationship with his fath.....Oh. OH. What does that say about me. I don't wanna know.
That being said, I reached my age thinking "garbage favourite" was people like the aforementioned old Roose or Celegorm? Mazikeen? Prince Nuada? or maybe Pintel and Raggetti? I hadn't taken a real hot dumpster-dive until I unearthed the Night Lords and their Primarch out of the trash.
Sevatar. That's it, that's all.
I by no means can even fathom telling longtime fans how to Warhammer - that being said, I'd offer that there is a delicate balance between acknowledging real-life parallels and influences and treating everything as a real-life political allegory in an expansive universe where its draw is that we're dealing with otherworldly measures and notions on the regular. Like. I'm sure there are other issues too pertaining to the larger motives, ethics and concepts of humanity in it, beyond trying to work out if the Imperium fan or the Tau fan is the more fascist. Also tbh...let people enjoy it a little. If they wanna taste the illusory charm of tribalism or the fleeting taste of dying for a political system that treats you like canon fodder yet from which you derive the meaning of your life, I'd rather they do it in Warhammer 40k than outside Warhammer 40k, ya know?
I got into TTS. I'm now having the Emperor's dea- I'm sorry the MOTHERFUCKING EMPEROR'S deadpan snark as a constant third-person narration in my head.
Seriously, it's so good, and it helped me put a lot of the lore in some sort of order.
Finding out what books to read is a pain. They are so many and I gathered the writers change and characterizations change with them. I started from those with the best quotes.
The memes are something I lament I'd not found out till now.
Being into Warhammer while being fluent in Greek and Latin is....something. My joy at seeing latin terms used and being able to gauge the meaning of things by name violently clashes with my irrational rage at the lack of declension. (It's "Ave Domine Noctis" dammit!!! "Adepti Mecanici"! "Sororitas Adeptarum"!) Of course all this is Gothic, so my point is moot. I guess.
Personally I don't mind the lack of female Custodes (or Marines). If they can find a way to include some in the future in the lore without brazenly retco-gaslighting everyone Ba-Sing-Se style, then hey, nice! But I don't want them to force it as prescribed by exterior pressures. I'd rather some more material was made public on the female chapters of the Imperium.
Also I'd love more from the aliens' side, as I've seen it being a pretty big complaint of people who don't like the glorification of the Imperium - though tbf, I do think the Imperium is the most interesting part of the galaxy, and with good reason. Still, I do like experimental stuff, and going cosmic. Would love something more about the relations of the Aeldari and the Drukhari, as well as maybe a dip into Chaos?
It's a goddamn shame an animated series hasn't happened yet.
Me love how many refs are scattered through, especially literary ones (Caliban? Fyodor Karamazov? Nostramo and Curze? Fuck yeah)
Once more, why do larger planets don't have more than one human cultures on them instead of all being like huge cities? Come on guys, do it, so few do so in scifi.
I don't think it's racist to be racist against all-consuming insect dinosaur hiveminds and creatures that murderfuck you on site. The Tau are on thin ice, but acceptable. The Eldar too, though I do admit if they'd given originally birth to aforementioned murderfuckers, I'd find them kinda sus too. (about that whole real-life allegory thing? You see how it kinda falls apart like that, ey?)
Once again, the greater tragedy is the mistakes parents commit when bringing up their children (or not bringing them up). The Primarchs being either held back, struggling against or captive of their traumas is an excellent story against the backdrop of the grim darkness of the far future. I hope we can one day see what the Emperor intended for each of them.
I am very down bad, and if anyone wants to chat or comment or challenge my hot takes, they are free to. Warhammer is not exactly something I can initiate the people in my life into. I read the introduction to my mom and she looked at me like she was considering the odds of me having banged my head real hard XD
Getting into a large-scale cosmic horror when the worst scenarios for humanity have kinda happened and you start at the point of absolute nihilistic despair and have to find out how to function and remain human is surprisingly soul-cleansing at an time when actuality is so absolutely disappointing and pedestrian.
Warhammer and Hellsing Abridged need a crossover.
Why does this universe remind me so much of Second Apocalypse by Scott Bakker?
I'm nearing the end of my second read through of Malazan, this time including all of the other in universe books as well, and I'm trying to figure out what to read next. Malazan is my favorite series, and before that it was Wheel of Time. It's between Black Company, First Law, Lies of Locke Lamora, Second Apocalypse, and The Locked Tomb. Any opinions would be appreciated.
“What if the choice isn’t between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?”
With regard to R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books:
i'd be very interested in hearing why you both really like that series and also think it would be super alienating/what its target audience is
Yeah. So. OK.
The short version is "these are books for philosophy and history nerds, who love dense complicated worldbuilding, and who are lacking a lot of common social/ideological allergies."
They are fantasy books that take ideas seriously, in a way that will appeal to a lot of the people reading this. They're built on top of some really really cool metaphysical premises, and they explore those to the utmost. They do Big Sweep of History better than most fantasy books purporting to do that thing; the first trilogy in the series is essentially about a crusade, of the real Reclaim the Holy Land style, and it does a bang-up job capturing both the grandeur and the grotesquerie entailed in that kind of endeavor.
They have a lot in common with rationalist fiction, in a "descended from a common intellectual ancestor" kind of way, but they do a lot of important things very differently from capital-R Ratfic in a way that I like. They have a much darker moral and cosmological tone, with the gee-whiz take-us-to-the-stars optimism replaced by a kind of profound historical and cosmological horror. They are also, overall, much more literary and just-plain-weird in style. One of our protagonists is basically a rationalist supergenius raised in isolation who's just now encountering the world and learning to bend it to his will, and...well, the process is cool and maybe even overall good (maybe) (very maybe) but it sure is unsettling in basically every conceivable way.
The worldbuilding is also top-notch, in my opinion, not only in terms of depth but in terms of tone and style. It's a big, sprawling setting that feels like it was created by someone who honest-to-God knows how to channel Tolkeinian numinousness and someone who knows and appreciates pulp fantasy and someone who's actually read a goddamn history book.
But.
...look, I don't even know where to start here. Let me just list a grab-bag of things that are true about these books:
In the first trilogy, we have two major POV characters. One of them is a very sweet, angsty, relatable dude who also understands a lot of key facts about the setting history and the magic system. The other is a ruthless sociopath who engages with literally everyone and everything in a purely manipulative way. Guess which one we get to spend hundreds of pages with first, before meeting the other?
The ultimate bad guys of the setting, the Mordor faction, consists of aliens whose culture is built around the idealization of rape. Their hordes of minions, the orc-analogues, are genetically engineered rape monsters.
...there's a lot of conspicuously offputting sex stuff in general, in fact.
Long stretches of the narrative are basically misery porn, in which we get to see close-up just how grindingly awful it is to be part of a crusading army on the march / to be a prostitute in a city through which a crusade is passing / etc.
The metaphysics, which are the conceptual foundation of the series and also its coolest feature, do not get revealed in significant depth until halfway through the third volume. A friend of mine read the series on my recommendation, and kept asking me questions that amounted to "...are you sure these are the books you keep talking about?"
You do not find out until at least six books in whether our sociopathic rationalist supergenius protagonist is essentially benevolent or not. Despite spending an awful lot of time in his head.
Plus, y'know, there's generally a lot of philosophical jawing.
Plus...even I have to admit that, especially starting with the second trilogy, the series starts making a number of unforced errors. (There's a moment where we go back to the Monastery of Rationalism whence our protagonist dude sprang, and we learn a lot more about what went on there, and...sense-making gets sacrificed for shock horror in a big way.)
In sum: there's something to offend just about everyone, deeply. Old-school fantasy lovers will dislike the constant nasty subversions of classic numinous Cool Fantasy Stuff. Contemporary nu-fantasy types will dislike the extent to which the series is about the powerful wreaking their will upon the powerless, the general (extremely deliberate) sexism of the setting, etc. People who are there for the setting will be annoyed by how much is concealed for a very long time; people who are there for the characters will be annoyed by how unlikeable many of the key characters are. Almost everyone will be wigged out by the sloggy unpleasantness, the sexual grossness, or both.
I’ve given my thoughts on the noble oevre of R. Scott Bakker here, and they are not wholly complimentary, but never let it be said he didn’t come up with some cool stuff.
