#digital bones

If, like me, you've been despairing that a follow-up to the critically praised and containment-breaking Astartes series of short films was never going to happen because it was not in alignment with Games Workshop's promotional strategy for Warhammer 40,000, I guess this should come as a relief. After all, a great deal of footage in this teaser is either taken directly from or expands on footage previously seen only on Syama Pedersen's Patreon.

But with a projected release of 2026 and such a heavy reliance on five-year-old animation, I can't help but wonder what the holdup has been. Astartes has arguably done more to promote the Warhammer brand than anything Games Workshop has produced in the last decade - its reuploads are million+ view videos on YouTube and its arguable that its success contributed to reviving the Space Marine video game brand after a decade of dormancy.

I wonder if the success of Secret Level - to which Pedersen contributed and whose Warhammer episode clearly owes a great deal of inspiration to the original Astartes - may not have shaken something loose. We've seen brand-aligned Warhammer+ content like Pariah Nexus and the Tithe fail to meaningfully move the needle of popular consciousness.

And at least part of that has been paywalling the content so that only the most ardent enthusiasts will ever see it. My drafts are full of unpublished think pieces on the whys and wherefores of Warhammer+, so I won't pretend to have been ahead of the curve on this one, but I don't think that any of it is worth seven bucks a month. Warhammer isn't G.I. Joe or Transformers, but I think the idea of an animated series to drive interest in and sales to the merchandise is an evergreen business model when properly executed.

Nor is it clear to me that releasing the teaser on YouTube is going to drive subscriptions to Warhammer+. The streaming model hasn't exactly been doing gangbusters the past few years and if you're not interested in the Warhammer+ subscriber exclusive miniature then there's really no reason to subscribe to such a niche service for one show.

I don't pretend to have any particular inside knowledge of the situation between Games Workshop and the various creators that they've tangled with over the years. A lot of people have a lot of thoughts about the fanpocalypse of 2021 which resulted in SODAZ's disavowal of Warhammer and the spectacle Bruva Alfabusa made of ending Text-to-Speech, among others.

But on the flip side, you have creators like Richard Boylan that successfully parlayed a YouTube video into the Warhammer+ Angels of Death series; and despite memory holing the Lord Inquisitor, Erasmus Brosdau went on to direct the Enemy Without.

So it's not entirely beyond the ken that there's a wholly anodyne explanation for why, after five years, Games Workshop is finally returning to Astartes, and any rumor of acrimony between the company and their creatives is just a pernicious libel like the Warhammer/WarCraft connection.

I had previously believed - and, if I'm being entirely honest, still do - that there must have been some sort of creative disagreement between Games Workshop and Pedersen regarding the direction that Astartes should take, given the alacrity with which Boylan's project was produced while Pedersen's languished, even if it was something as simple as reticence to revamp the project to showcase Primaris Space Marines instead of the classic style.

As I observed at the time, Astartes was the single best piece of Space Marine media of the last thirty years and precious little has come out since that can hold a candle to it. I don't hold any of the subsequent Warhammer+ series to date in particularly high regard - bully for Boylan, but Angels of Death bored me to tears; Iron Within had all the cinematic spectacle of a Playstation 2 cutscene; and Pariah Nexus could charitably be described as unfocused, or uncharitably as a hot mess. I've been so thoroughly underwhelmed by what's on offer, I skipped the Tithe entirely and I have no comment on anything it depicted so don't at me.

But, here's the thing that really has me concerned, and to which I alluded in my earlier post:

This teaser trailer is not actually clips from the new animation, instead showing a compilation of shots that represent the former lives of the characters that will appear in the show.

While there is some footage that may not have previously been released, I'm extremely confident that almost everything seen in the trailer is taken from the original development of Astartes 2 before Games Workshop got involved, and the project has been on ice ever since. Some clips like the orks dogpiling the Lamenter have previously escaped from behind the Patreon paywall and at this point, I'm reasonably certain that most of it can be found as reuploads on YouTube.

The best case scenario, and my hope for the series, is that Pedersen's Digital Bones brand/studio/Patreon campaign is basically the licensee for Astartes and is granted sufficient autonomy to produce a product that's faithful to his creative vision for it.

It's not enough to simply mimic the structure and style of the original short, Secret Level did that and while it was certainly a higher quality production than any of the outsourced industrial animation "Warhammer Storyforge" slop that's appeared on Warhammer+, it's self-evidently an imitation; like a cover band serviceably performing your favorite song. It has to be better than that.