On Slaanesh
I’ve been thinking of The Problem Of Slaanesh for a while. A couple of queer-focused articles brought it back to focus. I’ve linked to this by Timothy Francis over at Outermode which takes a positive approach, arguing you can make what you wish. Jamie over at Tankpot takes a more critical angle, basically taking highlighting a selection of the reasons why Slaanesh is a problem, and an analysis on why Ynnead may be GW’s attempt to write their way around it. I think I agree.
Say hello to Ynnead’s Avatar, everyone. We’ll come back to them soon.
This is going to ramble. I warn you in advance, it comes to no conclusions. This is thinking about tactics to approach these issues. Some of the points are huge problems in and of themselves.
Slaanesh is, as GW won’t describe it, the Chaos God Of Fuck. This makes it a double problem for the company. On one hand, they have one of their four primary antagonistic forces entirely not-PG rated (so automatically causing problems for younger gamers. Or rather, the parents of younger gamers). On the other hand, you have a set of queer-coded villains who implicitly state that any variance in sexuality or gender is a sure way to damnation (so automatically causing problems for any gamer who thinks that, actually, no, that’s just not true.) Plus for a good chunk of gamers, just having such a set of sexualised miniatures is a wincer.
This problem has actually got worse as the universe has altered over the years.
Francis notes the Queer-imagery that percolates through the Warhammer universes, even outside Slaanesh. This comes from various places inspirations, but I’d mostly argue comes from 70s British Fantasy’s response and assimilation of to punk. Punk similarly used a lot of queer and fetish imagery, which worked its way into the 2000AD, which is obviously a major visual influence on 40k.
In other words, Warhammer’s founding was born of the counter-culture, and generally British working class’ counter-culture. Using any of these visual signifiers in any way was a relatively radical position in a medium where Dragonlance was considered cutting edge. Fantasy elsewhere in this period seemed primarily informed by the early 70s and sixties. This, born of punk, was closer to the conversation, and whose ideas were informing the conversation. You can certainly draw a parallel between Games Workshop’s earliest period as a general distributor and – say – Rough Trade record shops.
Let’s go in another direction. Consider the metaphysical axis that Warhammer rests. Rather than Good and Evil we have Law and Chaos. This is a lift from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books, most relevantly Elric. In the Eternal Champion sequence, Elric is torn between the two, and the books are about a search for balance. Philosophically speaking, this is a more interesting axis - without explicitly trying to deconstruct what the words mean anyway, “Good Versus Evil” can only mean that we’re on the side of Good. “Order versus Chaos” is actually a philosophical question. What is important?
It’s worth noting that one of the other primary Warhammer influences - and I’d argue THE primary influence on 40k – also uses this dichotomy. 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock and associated stories use Law and Chaos, but writer Pat Mills almost always comes down on the side of Chaos. In the universe of Nemesis, the Termight empire of Earth wages a war of genocide against the rest of the galaxy to bring the jackboot down on them forever, chanting catchy slogans like Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave. The diverse aliens have to oppose them. The humans are, without a doubt, the bad guys, and “order” is just another word for “monstrous Imperialism”. The humans are grotesque parodies, but the aliens are also explicitly freakish, but their bizarreness bears no relation to their morality. It’s okay to be a freak. It’s better to be a freak – or rather, better to be what Order would label a freak.
Now we come to the original mode of 40k. It is somewhere between satire and horror, depending on its inclination. As I’ve said many times before, the point of 40k there is that there are no good guys. Like 2000AD, it is implicitly and explicitly counter-cultural, a big black joke at the horror of existence.
Now, in that context, where Slaanesh was born, it become something else. If the Empire/Imperium are not the good guys, then Slaanesh and everything it represents are not implicitly the bad guys. It’s about the dynamic between puritanical excesses and its opposite. In a universe with no good options, it’s easier to imagine going “Given a choice between your idea of order and this idea of damnation, I choose damnation”. Fuck it. Let your Freak Standard Fly.
I’m sure you see the problem.
As the Imperium moves more even slightly towards a reading of them as heroes, the more it makes Slaanesh harder to defend. If the Empire is the good guys, it’s not hard to work out what the sexy people with less gender conforming bodies are.
But that’s me with my adult mind. I look back at how I felt about Slaanesh when I was an early teenager.
I remember how I felt about Realm of Chaos. I was petrified of Slaanesh. I didn’t like thinking about Slaanesh. I never stopped thinking of Slaanesh.
The other element of Warhammer is that it is a horror fantasy universe, which was primarily aimed at British boys. Slaanesh is literally powered by homophobia, transphobia and the fear of the other… but the point of Slaanesh is that This Is Inside You. Slaanesh doesn’t just exist as a thing to punch. Slaanesh exists as a threat to your own identity. Whatever your identity actually ends up shaking down as, you were still afraid of this. Maybe this is what you wanted after all, says she who thirsts and suggests you thirst too. And Slaanesh takes that, strips away the polite whispers and just PUTS IT OUT THERE. It’s taking what mainstream culture doesn’t talk about and putting it in the game books. It isn’t really about expressing the designers homophobia – or at least, I suspect not primarily. It’s about using homophobia to disturb teenagers. Notice I don’t say straight cis boy teenagers. In my experience, to grow up in a homophobic society and be queer is to be afraid of yourself. I was afraid of Slaanesh because, to some small degree, this was what society would think of me if it truly knew me. I was afraid of Slaanesh because I didn’t want it to be true.
And you immediately go “Wait – this isn’t the sort of shit we should be pushing into vulnerable kids heads?”
And yeah, you’d think obviously not, but…
We hit the Lovecraft problem, which is not that his work is racist (which is evidently true) but its a considerable portion of its aesthetic innovations and merit is 100% powered by its racism. It is fear of the Other writ large. You cannot remove the racism from Lovecraft any more you can remove the uranium from an A-bomb and still expect it to flatten cities.
That’s an exaggeration. Defusing the genre and trying to work out ways to get similar effects without similar problems is one of the goals that generations have wrestled with, but you need the awareness that the Ur-text is simultaneously Great and Reprehensible. Genre is a building whose foundations are made of corpses.
This is the argument I first met in Reynolds/Press’ The Sex Revolts, which they lifted from Ellen Willis, based upon finding the Sex Pistols Bodies more inspiring that the most morally pure women’s music due to the commitment and belief, in the same way that you could admire a rocket without worrying about its fuel (misogyny) and its target (you). In the case of Lovecraft, fear of the other is built somewhere into us, and in a horror work, pricking that uncomfortable feeling is 100% the point. Only someone with a crippling fear of the other could evoke that so horrifically.
In the case of Slaanesh, I find myself thinking early Slaanesh which was more explicit is actually less of a problem that later, reduced-horror Slaanesh, due to the fact it was aiming at that with more determination. There was nothing sexy about Slaanesh. The sexlessness of 40k’s worldbuilding, while lifting so much visual fetish imagery, is one of the more interesting aesthetic aspects of its world, and I suspect should be an essay of its own.
One final aspect on here, and the possibility of inverting societal hate into weapons, defenses and survival tactics. I think of an culturally marginalised friend’s response to Shut Up And Sit Down’s take down of Cards Against Humanity. How dare they police how I process my trauma. There’s certainly a reading of Slaanesh which you could file next to that.
However, I feel all of the above only works in Games Workshops earlier counter-cultural days. As a multinational corporation, it holds far less water. You can’t get away with that when you are a micro-Disney with chainswords.
So what can you get away with? What can you do about this fantasy of an earlier age to make it work in ours?
Well, you could just kill Slaanesh. I can see the argument for that. I certainly wouldn’t be angry if they did, but I’m going to forward alternative approaches.
Jamie notes that that the Eldar are the race who have always been the race which includes the progressive ideals. In fact, that’s one of the things which makes Slaanesh so problematic – the implication that sensuality and intellectuality will lead to damnation. As such, Ynnead – the new death god born to keep their spirits safe from their literal worst sides – provides an antagonist and balance to Slaanesh.
And, as Jamie also notes, it’s clear that there is a blurring or questioning of gender in the Avatar of Ynnead.
I think this is critical. We think about diversity as a representation issue, but it’s more complicated than having positive role models, especially in a universe as fucked up as 40k. When you have many characters of any group, the less any one of those specific characters has to represent. Or to put it another way – the queerer they make the Eldar, and the more queer content there is elsewhere in Warhammer 40k, the less problematic Slaanesh becomes.
While there’s approaches to the models that I suspect should be phased out in terms of fetishising of bodies, there’s places where a wider representation gives the freedom to make Slaanesh bad guys. By having explicitly queer content elsewhere, it makes clear the problem is based on Slaanesh specifically rather than their identity generally. I always come back to the quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” There’s examples of every stereotype in the world, but everyone who conforms to a stereotype is also more than the stereotype.
So that’s the core of problem of the Problem of Slaanesh – as in, it’s not the problem of Slaanesh. The problem of Slaanesh is that it’s in the Warhammer universe, and it’s the Warhammer universe that has to change… and then She Who Thirsts becomes less of a problem.
