The Drunken Skunk

And I'm gonna be honest, it's not bad!

Whoever made this understood the assignment: life in 40k sucks, everyone is awful, Shit Is Comprehensively Fucked in the Grim Darkness of the Grim Dark far future of Grim Dark. Very enjoyable glimpse into something slightly more nightmarish than reality.

And then I made the mistake of looking at the comments and people's reactions on bluesky.

Obviously, there were people alternatively making fun of/lamenting the fact the Eldar got, like, a second of screen time. And several more talking about how a lot factions just straight up don't exist in this trailer, like Votann and the Dark Eldar, and others.

But there was at least one post that really chived my spuds. I can't find the specific one that set me off at the moment, and I'm sure there's probably been more than one by now. But I saw somebody complaining about how there were no Tau, and we didn't get to see "The Good Guys" of 40k in this trailer.

Y'all.

I feel like people don't properly understand what the Tau are making fun of, and why they are, in fact, not the good guys. Like, there are no good guys in 40k, that's kind of the conceit of the setting, but the Tau are really, VERY MUCH not the good guys.

I can actually prove this, if I may. Stay with me here, I promise I'm going somewhere with this. And I know what y'all are thinking right now.

But let's take a close look at what the Tau actually do. Like, ignore the Orientalist aesthetic and the giant anime robots and the vaguely racist accents in the video games for the moment. These trick people into thinking they're Space Communists, somehow, which they really, REALLY aren't. I'm not talking about the visuals. I'm talking about taking a look at the actions of what the Tau do in the setting.

The Tau:

Have a vast military industrial complex constantly pumping out highly sophisticated weapons technology, partly to make sure their military is equipped with the bleeding edge of what they're capable of making, but mostly to make a few select individuals obscenely wealthy.

Have a culture of military adventurism baked into almost every strata of their society, where every war they wage is considered Just and Right, because they're spreading freedom and democracy The Greater Good.

Have a military doctrine centered mostly around striking hard and fast - shock and awe, if you will - with limited numbers of highly trained infantry supported by combined arms, as well as extensive use of drone warfare, meaning that if you fight the Tau, you're likely gonna get killed by something you can't even see and didn't know was there.

Constantly expand their borders, fueled by the urging of the Ethereal caste and their dream of Manifest Destiny, where the Tau eventually control the entire galaxy.

Regularly engage in this expansion by using Gunboat Diplomacy in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt, in the sense that they will quite often park a fleet of warships in orbit above a planet they want, and say to the inhabitants "You WILL be joining the Greater Good now," and just... letting The Implication hang in the air.

Claim that their culture is a melting pot of many alien cultures and races, but one look at the Tau Empire makes it abundantly clear that non-Tau are not quite as equal as claimed, and the people in charge - the Ethereal caste, who are ALWAYS Tau - are really just white Tau supremacists. But they don't say the quiet part out loud, because that would be uncouth.

Do you fucking get it yet?

The Tau are Space Americans.