IT'S AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT'S LITERALLY WORD-OF-GOD AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT COULDN'T BE ANY MORE CLEAR-CUT
YOU CAN LITERALLY GOOGLE THE PHRASE "WHAT IS WARHAMMER AN ALLEGORY FOR" AND YOU WILL GET THAT AS A FRONT-PAGE RESULT
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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prime contender for one of the most "no investigation no right to speak" a g*mer has ever embodied 
I know basically nothing about Warhammer, so I typed it into image search to see if it was super obvious and this was on the first page of results.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably not a subtle allegory lol.
Warhammer Fantasy is different from Warhammer 40k, but it's pretty much just a piss take on how horrific and shitty sword and sorcery fantasy worlds really are, cutting away all the anachronistic romance and replacing it with horror and filth. It's basically satirizing fantasy monarchist apologia and romanticism in the same way 40K directs that towards fashy sci-fi.
Neither setting does a particularly good job with the satire though, imo, to the point that I'd almost say 40K is more "what if Judge Dredd went back into space and we took this to a whole new level of silly? Like we could do a Judge Dredd/Dune crossover with like elves and shit, lmao," than it is even the sort of tepid and still-brainwormed satire that Judge Dredd was.
I mean, it still has to sell miniatures and is owned by a corporation that has many incentives to cut away anything particularly biting.
But see Krieg Imperial Guard have gas masks and I like gas masks and you know the swastika is really just religious imagery and well you know war is brutal so you really have to just do whatever you can against the fake plastic armies of Chaos and space elves and undead robots and green men and those weird things that spit acid at you so actually YOU'RE the fascist for even bringing it up to begin with!!!!!
No you don't understand Krieg is inspired by a combination of all the forces from WWI which is why it's okay for someone to paint theirs like the afrika korps and add swastika transfers. 
Oh God that reminded of some chud that was trying to argue that his afrika korp "inspired" imperial guard army (complete with custom afrika korp emblems but with the swastika replaced with an imperial aquilla) wasn't fascist and didn't make him a fascist. Spoiler: the rest of his account was wheraboo-level Nazi tank worship including pictures of a whole-ass shrine to them he made complete with anime girl nazi officers
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds. GW should nuke every guard subfaction but valhallans and then make them communist rebels.
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds.
I still won't give up my guard army, but honestly 40k in general has too many chuds. Gone are the days of it being satirical and people understanding that the clearly theocratic fascist imperium aren't The Good Guys™. Now a days GW hides behind the shield of "it's satire guys, don't be fascist!!1!1!" while writing the hundredth book about how it's actually cool and good for a ~~ubermensch~~ superhuman dictator to slaughter billions in the name of some fictional past glory days
Yeah, I know. Some pig lives matter themed ultramarines would be a funny bit of satire to me. You've already got the blue and the skulls and the fascist oppression. However, warhammer fans would see it as unironically supporting fascist super cops. So I'd never paint it because warhammer is the wrong fandom to do it in. Same with trans masc space marines. Getting juiced up on super testosterone is something you can do a lot of gender themes with, but warhammer is too fascist to do it right.
I think I've seen blue lives matter themed space marines before, so you're unfortunately late to that party. Satire is truly dead
"these fascists are just like cops" by someone who hates both versus "these fascists are just like cops" by someone who loves both. Don't want to be mistaken for these second, but wh hasn't been satire since like the first edition.
yeah top result on google is "it's an allegory for germany" (the empire)
a little further down I found this: https://br.ifunny.co/video/warhammer-is-an-allegory-it-s-a-commentary-on-fascism-yd0RLTL29
Might be some confusion there. In warhammer fantasy, the empire is very much supposed to be the HRE: a bunch of squabbling states that are only nominally subservient to the central authority of the emperor. The Imperium of Man in 40k on the other hand is just fascism. Love to have two settings that use similar names, definitely not confusing, thank u james workshop.
Yeah they literally copied Mussolini artworks and replaced him with the god-emperor.
The grandaddy of the fantasy genre, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, is so old it's an allegory for the evils of the Industrial Revolution.
An early draft of The Fall of Gondolin featured orcs in mechanized tanks.
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The grandaddy of the fantasy genre, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings
George MacDonald/HG Wells/William Morris erasure!!!
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It's going to blow their minds once they figure out who the Empire in Star Wars was an allegory for.
I'd like to have this person watch Starship Troopers and then write an essay on what it's about.
They'd probably think it was about how fascism is good. It doesn't go far enough imo.
That’s actually what the book is about, though! Heinlein was a classic example of a libertarian-turned-fascist. He wrote a book about how war is cool and the military is a necessary part of an ordered society. The book reads like satire because you would have to be a very dumb Nazi to read it and think “Of course we should be constantly at war with a faceless and dehumanized enemy, and create a society around that principle. This makes sense and is good.” but that’s literally what Heinlein was trying to say, or at least present as a possibility in the book.
There’s some argument that he was being ironic and leaving things to be interpreted by the audience, but if you look at his work on the whole, and his political opinions, it’s clear that he’s just a bog-standard American conservative who likes war, racism, and misogyny, but doesn’t like the government or taxes.
You can explicitly make the fascists into cartoon villains like Star Wars and still get people doing the "empire did nothing wrong" larp and unironically making support for fascists their identity through it.
The funniest part of Disney acquiring Star Wars has been them putting on unironic fascist parades for their space nazi IP. Like, kids in theme parks watching storm troopers demonstrate their discipline in full regalia for the people to share in their display of strength. And then they have a fascist gift shop at the end. It’s super unhinged.
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I found his essay
"Cool soldier guys cleanse the galaxy of unholy xenos"
That's all it says, he turned in the same paper for the Warhammer essay too.
Damn, F 10% for correctly identifying the movie and writing name and date at the top of the paper
killing bugs duh
While listening to "Dixieland" on electric violin.
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To these kinds of people, nothing is political until their views are challenged. Politics dominates every facet of their life and they only notice when a necessary change is pointed out.
I once got a whole room of guys to laugh when I mentioned the X-men comics are an allegory for persecuted ethnic, religious, sexual, etc minorities. That one is the most clear allegories out of any popular media, and yet people still don't get it. The mutants are clearly oppressed, they're not typical superheroes who are fighting crime out of some intrinsic feeling of superiority. The X-men are organized and militant to defend themselves from discrimination.
The 2000s era X-men movies are even more clear about it, although they squeeze the allegory down so that mutants specifically represent queer people. You've got teenage runaways, unsupportive families, and there's a whole theme of mutants figuring themselves out around the age of puberty. There's a line in the second movie where one mutant's mother asks "Have you tried not being a mutant?" which is a parody of a common conservative line from the time "Have you tried not being gay?" I mentioned all of this and only got one guy on board because I mentioned the director, Bryan Singer, is gay. Then he was able to believe there's gay stuff in the X-men.
I think some people only engage in media because it's comforting lights and sounds they can distract themselves with
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They followed it up with:
Where's the gender dysphoria in warhammer then?
Good stuff.
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