Kaos M(a)je

And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.

He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.

Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.

People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.

That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!

You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.

Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.

The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”

I've thought about it a lot and it does add up in a horrifying sort of way.

There has been this lil thing needling my brain when consuming Warhammer content where I'm like...annoyed that nobody matters? That 95% of life in this universe is regarded as cheap and meaningless? That, unless you're part of this top echelon of humanity, you're basically on par with a mouse who's solely been bred into existence to feed a snake.

And I've known on an intellectual level it's a dumb thing to feel irked by--like it's a Grimdark setting, this is the whole deal--but I kept asking myself "why does this get under my skin?" and I think that quote perfectly explains why.

The British class system is so fucked and omnipresent that, like, yeah: for the vast majority of British history, most British citizens have been feeder mice and they're well aware of their place in the hierarchy. You aren't allowed to forget it. The aggessive classism is baked so deep into the culture that it becomes a sort of obvious, bland fact of life.

And America has it's own insane class issues and rampant inequality, but we also have the myth of the American Dream and a hyper-individualist culture counteracting it. So while you are almost certainly a feeder mouse, you're still raised to feel "I'm something, I'm important, the world just doesn't know it yet". A whole country of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

So Warhammer represents the British class system turned up to 10000; most people are a speck floating by in the background of a story about bigger, grander characters and there's nothing they can really do about it. The random guardsman is never going to become a character as important as a fuckin Primarch, there's no narrative upward class mobility if you will.

But Dungeons and Dragons is almost always a story about a ragtag crew of random schmucks taking on Big Bads and defeating them, it's about equal opportunity heroism. You may be a rogue who started life as a pickpocket street urchin, but you and your friends still lay waste to an overpowered evil wizard using naught but wits and teamwork.

And it's embarrassing to admit, but my American brain worms start screaming when presented with such a British worldview because it makes it clear: I would not matter in this setting. If I existed in this universe, I'd be dead, enslaved, a servitor, working myself into an early grave in a hive world factory or cannon fodder because that's just how life is for 95% of humanity and there's no reason why I'd be the exception. And the fact is, as unpleasant as it is to acknowledge, my dogshit American main character syndrome ego does not like that.

Like Astartes are at their core deeply tragic creatures. They're people who've been turned into tools to serve the interests of fascist imperialism and, in the process, have had their humanity stripped away because they're purely utilitarian by design.

The scope of their entire existence has been narrowed down to a single point. They're more advanced than baseline humans in a physiological sense--stronger, faster, larger, better reflexes, etc--but beyond that, they're actually more limited.

There's a point in one of the Night Lord books where Octavia observes that, for all of the Astartes' advanced capabilities, they're really quite developmentally stunted. Like, huge powerhouses with unnaturally long lifespans, but the hyper-simplistic emotional depth and worldview of a 12 year old.

Which adds up. The Astartes love to sneeringly dismiss things like sexuality, intimacy and romantic love as nothing but the base, inferior drives of mortals, but once you strip back the superiority complex, it just sounds like a tween boy who can't wrap their head around why anyone would want to kiss a girl.

And, again, it's all by design; the Imperium doesn't want them developing attachments outside of a basic sense of brotherhood and filial love for their Primarch because that distracts them from their sole intended purpose. You don't want your hammer vanishing on a fuck fueled vacation to Bali with your handsaw when you're trying to build a shed. It's all a means of control.

And I get finding one of them hot and having horny headcanon, go fuckin nuts.

But whenever I see a reddit post that's like "B-BUT THE SPACE WOLVES FUCK! HORNY ASTARTES ARE CANON--!", it's like...I dunno, isn't it more compelling if they can't? That they've been robbed of simple human joys in order to better serve the interests of an uncaring theocratic fascist state? And they can't even grasp what's been taken from them?

Now, this varies by chapter culture of course. Some - Iron Hands come to mind - are pretty utilitarian. But then plenty of other chapters have their own artistic flair. Space wolves have their sagas. Salamanders prize skillful artifice. The Blood Angels' third defining trait (outside of being vampires and tragic curses) is the beautiful artistic work on their gear.

Most notably though, I think, is the White Scars. Their chapter culture puts a really strong emphasis on the arts; their marines are expected to be proficient in poetry, caligraphy, singing, and the cultural history of their homeworld. Of course, this is all filtered through the extremely limited, single-minded perspective of an astartes, but it's there.

a "degenerate" is someone who caused/causes society to fall from that ideal past.

even applying the term "degenerate" to people who have actually sexually abused children, specifically, is still implying that there was once a world in which CSA did not exist, which society must return to, and which Certain Types Of People have caused society to stray from in the first place.