Warhammer 40Gay

Peace was never an option

Nearly 4 years ago, during the pandemic when I possessed more time for flights of fancy I wrote a piece for a glorious blog you may be aware of (THE AMERICAN SUN) on my views on Warhammer 40k. At the time I had been out of Warhammer for 4 years, having made the switch to playing 1/100 scale WW2 games (who needs space fascists when you can just role up with Panzertruppen?) and Battletech (which has since decayed even worse, I will not be reprising my role as a space maoist on the table any time soon). I expressed a basic view that Warhammer's rightwing appeal was only skin deep and that the game was undergoing a sort of change to a more liberal friendly view and that the “setting” or “property” always was a soulless product that would inevitably fall to they view of shareholders. 4 years later I stand vindicated. In my view 95% of 40k discourse takes place within the realm of tourists, so people being blindsided by the development in question (female space marines) both fails to surprise me and disappoints me immeasurably. I have played wargames the majority of my life. I've spent a greater portion of my adult life painting miniatures than a take seller who has opinions on this (read: audiobook listener who hasn't scared the hoes explaining his plastic model collection) has spent likely on anything. I choose a polemic tone here because individuals who've never stabbed themselves attempting to build a scale model babble about subjects that I know about intimately have babbled for years about the intrinsic basedness of what amounts to a soulless corporate toy soldier selling scheme. I am not on xitter, doing such would waste precious time that could be better spent huffing model paints and glue while listening to anime soundtracks and Wagner (a true wargamer spends his time correctly), but the takes do percolate back to my corner of the internet, so I'll throw my hat in here and try to bring the “I told you so perspective” here.

I will revisit the article I wrote when GW's community did performative BLM signaling in 2020 with several quotes in order:

“Warhammer from its core framing represents possibly the single most liberal tabletop wargame outside of explicitly political fare.

The entire conceit of the Warhammer setting exists to justify to its liberal audience the existence of any explicit authoritarianism.”

“Here lies the central conundrum of 40k. Most people aren’t able to parse irony without motivated reasoning (even internally), so there are two split portions of the fanbase: those that recognize the game as the satire it is, and those who took the rather poor writing all too seriously. When the writers of the game claim it is a satire of authoritarianism, they are entirely correct, but even so liberalism remains so fundamentally unappealing that a despotic empire explicitly built on the back of treating all of humanity like cattle looks better to the average person on aesthetics alone.”

“Games Workshop is left with a tough choice: double down on the satire (effectively undoing a decade or more of writing that took itself too seriously in the process) or try to rectify the seriousness of the writing with their worldview. GW has chosen the latter.”

-Me, this same publication, August 2020.

One can easily see this transition as far back as 40K's transition from 2^nd to 3^rd edition. There exists a recently made and fantastic interview with Rick Priestley, the essential creator of Warhammer 40k's first iteration, Rogue Trader, that covers the early history of the game by filmdeg miniatures on youtube. Prior to the audiobooks and youtube lore channels (Yes, I remember a time when Warhammer content on youtube was limited to rips of cutscenes from dawn of war) Warhammer was a means to sell toy soldiers to teenagers. Priestley tracks the creation of a pseudo-medievalist setting capitalizing on GW's then breakout Warhammer fantasy battles (something he was more intimately involved with over time) and how market demands and forces along with writers who went along the George RR Martin style of explaining everything (explicitly asking how does the Imperium's economy work, for example) transitioned it into what would eventually become the Marvel of right wing twitter. While Priestley doesn't go nuts the way I would, he leaves the subtext clear.

40k firstly and for mostly exists to sell overpriced plastic soldiers to 2 groups of people: nerds, and nerds who turn their noses up at the possibility of playing a historical wargame. The second group are infamous for not showering, giving 40k its extremely lackluster reputation among other participants in the wargaming hobby. The people who make Warhammer realize a lot more money is trapped in getting funko pop people to blow their pop! vinyl budget on space marines than there exists in pandering to people who care about layered storytelling with deep thematic resonance (so does Hollywood, see DUNC). So if getting the funko pop market requires female space marines and a shitty amazon adaptation with Henry Cavill to ease over the 'purists' GW will do it. GW has been making business decisions of this nature since the dawn of 2^nd edition, it’s just that those were 'minor shifts in lore' (major thematic changes) and a focus on plastic models over metal ones, so you weren't noticing. Now that it’s the tripwire everyone assured themselves their benevolent publicly traded corporate overlords would never cross, it is a public row.

While the inevitability of 40k becoming what it is should fail to shock anyone with more than a cursory understanding of GW's practices and history, the class element of this remains unstated. The RW Warhammer enjoyers fall into 2 primary categories: vetbro libertarians with some expendable income and lower class audiobook enjoyers who primarily interface with 40k as a setting. Exceptions exist of course, but so does Clarence Thomas; people still look for “good schools.” Neither of these categories provide a significant amount of money for GW, which looks at financially irresponsible Marvel/Disney/Star Wars fans as its financial future. These people are overwhelmingly left wing, and in a sense when they call you a “tourist chud,” they're not wrong. GW doesn't want you, and its been clear on this at least since 2020's “you're not welcome” post. Many misguided secondaries (people who don't play wargames) on RW xitter have confusedly grasped at “why GW do this, don't they know their fanbase is 90% based white men?” Go into a games store, for the love of God. GW products have and are making the shift to the flabby soylinnial antifa adjacent audience, content to push around unpainted plastic amidst funko pops and My Hero Academia figurines. GW explicitly courts this audience, willing to trap people who would never deign to play competing historical games (notably Bolt Action, which exists in the same scale and was designed in part by the same man, Rick Priestley) because “the Germans are icky” (I fail to understand why people who don't paint their miniatures anyway find the possibility of having to paint an iron cross icky, but whatever).

40k isn't for you. That's fine. There are better ways to spend your time than obsessing over obscurantia for a fictional setting and transhuman dolls. Within wargaming historicals are orders of magnitude cheaper, need new blood, and allow opportunities to play Napoleon, Washington, Caesar, Lee and No-no Austrian man with groups of like minded individuals. For literally ¼ of the cost of a standard 40k army you can enjoy Gettysburg at 8mm scale, pitched naval battles over the pacific ocean, nail biting infantry encounters on the Ostfront, or 8mm Roman imperials (a great way to flex on the GF next time she asks about thinking about Rome) all from Warlord Games. If you need sci-fi, Infinity might work, albeit there is a certain amount of anime inspired horniness, Star Trek style libtardism and schizophrenia you need to put up with to pit the cyberpunk Russian mob and their anime nun allies against the AI United Nations in space. One page rules allow seamless integration of existing Warhammer forces into a 3d printed wargame.

If you can't live without a multi-media setting and audiobooks, that's fine. You definitively aren't going to make it, and should consider a different thought space. I hear lukewarm commentary YouTube is having a comeback, selling takes about keemstar or whatever might be more your speed.

At the end of the day tabletop has always been driven by a DIY attitude. Warhammer 40k 3^rd edition was a cut down WW2 rules set built by Priestley in his spare time for example. GW being incrementally more shitty doesn't mean anything to the salt of the earth wargamers content to build their own rules-sets, experimenting with others, and generally having a good time with the boys. If you can't grasp this, the hobby is less for you than Warhammer, but if you have the agency to get to this blog and read this, the hobby probably is. So I'll leave the readers with an exhortation: Go buy some models, get some paints. Learn drybrushing and pin washing. Get obsessed over how to paint khaki, yellow, red, blue and army green. Watch 30 hours of make-up tutorials and anime figure painting guides to learn how to paint skin correctly. Spend a Saturday getting crocked with the boys rolling dice. Write a rules-set, edit someone else's. Re-learn D6 based statistics. Be the guy to finally make playing cards work in a wargame. It's tabletop and nobody can change what you do in your garage.