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Despite its recent association with the right, Games Workshop’s games from the 1980s adopt a broadly anti-authoritarian if not leftist stance. Zhu, who has written extensively about the politics of games set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy universes, notes that the company frequently poked fun at the right.

An early Games Workshop scenario invites players to side with dwarven characters patterned on the workers in the 1984-1985 U.K. miners’ strike, a labor action that was crushed by conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. One orc figurine appearing in White Dwarf #81 (Sept. 1986) even hoists a banner with Thatcher’s face on it.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader takes on a similar political bent. The Imperium of Mankind often borrows from 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd comics, a British science fiction satire that mocked Dirty Harry-style tough cops celebrated in much of American popular culture for their excessive vigilante justice.

As Zhu says, the early Space Marines were painted as petty tyrants rather than superheroes: “A lot of the artwork emphasizes their dehumanized nature. They’re presented as kind of monstrous, horrible. […] More often than not, they are depicted getting shot by space goblins, or carrying out trivial duties like arresting graffiti writers, or doing obviously bad things like taking slaves.”

Zhu finds other radical political elements in early Warhammer 40,000. For example, the alien Genestealer cultists in the 1980s appeared as limousine-driving industrialists who exploited rural planets in what seemed like a warning about the dangers of capitalist and colonial oppression.

Games Workshop has downplayed these more satirical elements in later decades. Some of this tonal shift was due to personnel changeover, Williams argues, but much of it was driven by the company’s growth. As Games Workshop expanded into overseas markets such as the U.S. in the 1990s, it dropped its working-class critique of British politics along with characters with names like “Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau” in favor of a more corporate style that would translate better for young American gamers.

As the most popular faction in the game, the Space Marines and their allies in the Imperium began to get the good-guy treatment in marketing. Warhammer 40,000 fiction in the Black Library series has been better about emphasizing the morally problematic nature of the Imperium, but advertisements and fluff as well as tie-ins such as video games undermine this by asking players to pledge loyalty to the game’s totalitarian empire.

Williams sees Games Workshop’s Primaris redesign of the Space Marines as reflecting a broader context of creeping authoritarianism. While the old Space Marine lines looked like “bulky space knights,” he says, the new models wear armor influenced by the “tacticool” aesthetic favored by SWAT teams and right-wing paramilitaries.

I know nothing at all about Warhammer so no opinion there, but I once asked a congregation of comic nerds (so, a forum) what’s the deal with Judge Dredd. I knew the concept (a cop / judge / jury / executioner dripping with machismo in a fucked up future), but what’s the angle? Is it played straight? Is it satire? Is Dredd the hero of the story, the anti-hero, the villain? Is it a device to say something else entirely? And pretty much everyone replied “YES”. It’s all of these things, occasionally at the same time.

So I tried it, I read a few volumes before I lost interest (it’s not bad there’s just a lot of it), and I came to the same conclusion. Depending on the story, Dredd can mean “fuck Dirty Harry” or “fuck yeah Dirty Harry!”, and sometimes it’s straightforward and other times it’s very complicated.

But here’s the thing. When an author with clear anti-authoritarian intent uses an authoritarian POV and narrative framework in order to ridicule it, and goes at it for too damn long, the framework takes over. The POV wins. The medium is the message.

I firmly believe that Verhoefen’s Starship Troopers would be the best satire ever made (that’s a big award, I mean it 100%) if it was a short film. It started very strong, and it was hilarious throughout, but there was one problem: it went on for too long, and by the end you were kinda glad that the drill sergeant made it out of the giant slug alive, because that’s just how film works.

hooray!

It isn’t an intellectual failure, it’s only a natural emotional response. You just gotta refrain from rationalising it (“actually the drill sergeant was a good egg!”). Of course this doesn’t negate the satire, but I think it does weaken it.

Think of nature documentaries. If the camera follows the wolf, you root for the wolf. If it follows the caribou, you root for the caribou. And if it’s complicated, it follows both the young frail caribou that got left behind and is getting eaten AND the wolf cub that starves to death because daddy didn’t find any caribous and didn’t bring home any food.

Now, if the camera follows a ridiculously exaggerated caricature of a wolf, you are at first conscious it’s a caricature. But keep that up for an hour and the gimmick fades to the background, the caricature becomes just a wolf, and you root for the wolf.

*doom music starts to play* I actually kindof like scheduling these kinds of appointments now...

but seriously Fellas, don't forget to schedule a pap smear every couple of years just in case. If you still have a cervix you can still get cervical cancer. ilu

it'd be a shame if this...

on survival

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

I've been thinking about this a bit lately, because something that really gets my creative juices flowing is interpersonal relationships and intimacy. You know what's great for exploring interpersonal relationships and intimacy? Smut.

Like, don't get me wrong. Drawing smut is fun and getting off to horny art is a treat, but I realize there is also something else going on for me personally. It's beautiful and scary opening yourself up to another person, and it's rich with storytelling potential. It's an area I see myself continuing to explore in the future.

a BOG is a wetland that is acidic