Some nerds were doing that thing where 40k fans are like “OH NO SEXZ IS HERESY!” when it’s pretty definitively not and is basically one of the only things in 40k that isn’t heretical (as long as you’re not doing evil slannesh shit) and it got me thinking about repression of sex under “in bad country regimes”.
And a whoooooooooooooooooooooooooole fucking thing in 1984 was how liberating and humanizing it was that the author’s grungy middle aged self-insert was boning a 19 year old member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and, like… America has several thousand different Junior Anti-Sex League and I’m not sure if the USSR ever had any? Like, yeah, maybe they did, but under capitalism Americans have literally convinced themselves they’ll go to hell if they see a tiddy and the English famously just hate joy. So what the fuck was Orwell trying to critique with his “Junior Anti-Sex League” in spoooooky Stalinist England?
I have a drawing saved from the net somewhere of a Repentia holding a demon head as big as her torso and absolutely beaming at the camera, just pleased as can be with herself. And then you notice her right arm is missing at the elbow and the only thing keeping her alive is an ad-hoc belt tourniquet. It’s kind of the model of how I htink of the Sisters.
I like the anti-canon that everyone is actually having a great time in the 40k universe being bloody minded monsters engaged in constant, meaningless warfare. Like, idk, HimboHammer 40k or something.
Like I do like the setting, the story, a lot of the ideas. I love the Imperium as this turbo-fash monstrosity that would be doing fine if it wasn’t so committed to shooting itself in the foot. But what really keeps me engaged is the goofy fanon stuff that just totally takes the piss out of hte grim dorkness.
I played Da Orkz because that was the bearable approach to the setting and its eroding sense of satire and very serious space fascism enjoying fandom encroachment. If da Orkiness was all over the setting, it’d feel like Mutant League Football with guns and tanks. And that’d be rad.
Hell yeah. I was orks too. I had whole killa cans made out of nothing but sprue and random gubbinz. Like half of my army was made of of non-ork bitz, sprue, random stuff in the bottom of my toolbox, and non-GW plastic. I liked that the rules for how to build orks was just “Go nuts as long as something is painted green” so I had tons of fun building boyz with big shields of styrene for my armored orks, kitbashing trucks, sticking bits from other model lines in weird places. I’m not even sure they’d let that army in the door at a GW shop anymore.
I squee’d a little when this person popped up in a darktide game.
There’s an abandoned crossover fanfic I read once where The Culture wanders into the WH40k setting and starts doing Special Circumstances to it, and Da Orkz were the only faction they basically just left alone and hung out with sometimes.