Since we talked about the 3rd edition codex its only natural that we talked about the 5th edition Necron codex. Released in 2011, this is the foundational text for the current Necron lore, and it has remained broadly consistent since then.
As people should be more or less familiar with this lore, I’m going to focus more on the controversy this book stirred up when it was released in this section.
 Now I’ve mentioned controversy because this book was not received well when it came out, which is a little amusing considering how popular the changes are now. To my knowledge, this was primarily because of the extensive overhaul of the lore. There are definitely people out there who are still unhappy but this, but overall, GW has no doubt been vindicated. The hate towards the ‘newcron’ lore, as it was labelled, wasn’t just an online thing. I wasn’t really in the online circles at the time, but I remember people at my then-local club disliked it.
Warhammer Fantasy was still kicking around at the time this book came out, and the new Necron lore was accused of being a lazy Tomb Kings in space rehash. The crux of the new lore is ancient dynastic nobles with an ancient Egypt aesthetic tricked into undeath and are now emerging from their tombs to reclaim their past glory and wage war on the living, which pretty much defines the Tomb Kings. On top of this, you have some Necrons insisting on following their ancient dynastic codes, and other lords and overlords attempting to live as they used to when they were people. Not to mention, only the nobles are properly sentient, with the elite warriors having a measure of intelligence and the base warriors being mindless thralls. All the above is pretty much beat-for-beat Tomb Kings lore.
Now you could say, what about the Eldar and High Elves, and Orks and Orcs? Well, they have some similarities, but are mostly different. High Elves don’t have aspect warriors or the path, nor do they have any equivalent to the Craftworlds or harlequins. As for the Orcs and Orks, the concept of the Waaagh is the only major thing they share. That the Necrons now had these ancient empires and personalities, which was completely at odds with what they used to be, the perceived similarities to the Tomb Kings only exacerbated things.
I’m certain that if you look through old forum posts, you’ll find other reasons, but this is the big one I remembered, partly because I shared it at the time. Basically, it all boils down to people not liking the change from what they were to what they are now. The capstone to all this was that Matt Ward was listed as the head author. If you don’t know, Matt Ward is/was a very infamous person within 40k. Matt Ward was a writer for GW in the mid/late 2000s and early 2010s. He had been the head writer for a number of controversial codexes, including the 5th edition Space Marines codex, the ‘Ultramarines are the best’ book, and the Grey Knights 5th codex, which gave us Kaldor Draigo, among other things. So, Matt Ward had a reputation amongst the community for writing bad books and ruining the lore. While I doubt he personally came up with everything in these books, he took the flak for them. All this is to say that Matt Ward copped a lot of shit for the Necron codex, and that further contributed to why this book was so controversial.
As an aside, while I believe it's been a long time since he worked with GW in an official capacity, he still works in the Warhammer space as he is one of the lead writers for Vermintide and Darktide. I don’t know if people still have a grudge with him, but I feel like it’s a safe bet that there are some folks out there still clinging on to it. The apocryphal story on why GW now credits the design team over individual authors for the rulebooks and such is that the authors, like Ward, were getting so much hate. I’ve seen people claim this is an excuse to not properly credit people, which could be true, but on the other hand, if the chuds had a name they could have pinned the female custodes on, it would have been bad.
(I wrote this review of the fifth edition Necron Codex book last month or so, and then some stuff happened, and I forgot about it. While I’m still posting because it was pretty much done, I’ve since realised that Tumblr isn’t really the space for content longer than 200 words or so.  So, if there was anyone out there really chomping at the bit for a part two, like with the 3rd edition book, apologies, but it would be more of an image collage with some text, if anything. And if people really are interested in my writing, well, I’m looking into other options.)
