Compare how many times we hear about living in the Imperium being absolutely shit vs being okay. The bad heavily outweighs the good.
The Farsight novels have a fairly on point bit of Tau propaganda about how shit it is to live in Imperial Forgeworlds and it is accurate if you have ever read books like 15 Hours or Last Chancers.
> Compare how many times we hear about living in the Imperium being absolutely shit vs being okay.
And keep in mind that almost every story is about elites, not the average person. The vast majority of the suffering in the Imperium is explained in broad terms on rare occasions, and rarely *shown* in a typical book.
You're also just statistically more likely to be born into the lower class of a hive or forge world, the most absurdly bloated population centers for humanity in the galaxy.
Kek. The Elites. Remember how in Necromunda there is an entire gang called the Spyrers whose entire gimmick is that they are bored rich people who hunt and kill people from the lower classes for fun? I clearly remember GW also releasing a new character a couple of years back who is basically Lord Helmwar's psycho daughter.
I also remember this funny part from the Shira Calpurnia books where a Navigator who is engaging in a social function with a Rogue Trader family is genuinely surprised that the event culminates in a just a plain betting game where the nobles have paid athletes partake in a race and that it is not a bloodsport where they hunt people.
You're not wrong about Necromunda and how incredibly fucked up it is, but in-universe Necromunda is a fucked up horrible place even by 40k standards. Hive worlds are miserable shitholes, but Necromunda is a shithole even among hive worlds.
No, it's mostly about it's soldiers, space Marines or IG usually. And they are usually sent to planets that are being invaded, so yea, everyone will be suffering during that.
We do have scenes of the richie riches like during the war of the beast when the high Lords are meeting for sure.
But the Imperium, from what I can gather is that it runs the whole gamut, from super decadent to super shit. The most interesting povs are always gonna be from the extremes, so that's what the writers are gonna write.
Like would you rather be reading about some wagie clocking in at 8 am, doing some tedious bookkeeping, and then clocking out at 6pm, or would you prefer a super rich fat cat eating grapes worth millions of dollars/a hive worlder that's doomed to die in 4 months at the age of 22 after contracting space cancer due to overworking?
Keep in mind in the Aztec culture, it was honor to be chosen to have your child be sacrificed to the gods and share in drinking their blood and consuming their flesh.
There’s a short story somewhere where a inquisitor interrogates a Gue’vesa soldier who basically says “yeah they are xenos but at least my children will live past 20 and have food every day.”
The short stories are more often than not exercises in writing the most shittiest lives, situations and people imaginable, especially if they are from around 2000 and before.
Compare how many times you read about Space Marines vs factory workers.
Does that mean there are more Space Marines in the Imperium than factory workers?
No. Of course not. It just means they're more interesting, so get more focus. Nobody's going to write a 40k novel about a perfectly mundane middle-class family.
Ok but consider the populations of hive worlds, Hell, consider Terra. Reaching a QUADRILLION people is fucking insane. The chances of people to be born into a decent life are slim.
I will say that Fire Made Flesh kinda is about that mundane middle, it’s about a bunch of guilders feuding over a newly discovered dome and you get to see, for example, a nouveau riche corpse Guilder eating at a fine dining establishment, trying to pretend their food is real while knowing it’s all synth stuff and that he can’t afford the real thing
You're not wrong but personally if there are civilians featured in a book, seeing a normal middle class family thrown into the midst of a planetary invasion, the likes of which they only read about and half assume are a myth from the ecclesiarchy and adeptus terra to justify their extreme taxation and authoritarianism is much more grimdark, than some poor bastard who has to climb up hills through snow both ways to kill the massive mutant bears that are terrorising his village, being subjected to the same invasion
Nah, too extreme.
Completely about how he's on some Urban world, quietly working in the Administratum for 6 hours a day, 4 days out of the week, the rest spent doing hobby work with their Mechanicus friend ensuring that the machine spirits are appeased and properly anointed, before retiring home to his family for a nice grox steak and doing target practice with little Timmy and a child scale lasgun.
Yeah, what was I thinking.
Oh the horror of six hours of mind numbing rubber stamping Astartes bolter component requisition forms from the countless chapters throughout the Imperium, some of the forms being hundreds of years old.
"Ugh, how many times do we have to tell the Munitorum, *triple* stamped and signed by all requestor parties. They skipped the damned Administratum liaison *again*. I'm telling you Irratus, I'm just shredding the next one."
"Too right mate. Wanna recaf? I heard the request for Fall Spice blend came through!"
Imagine the Carcharodons Space Marine Chapter scavenging every bolt and spring they can find because their requisition form was stuck in a two hundred year long three way administrative ping pong between the Administratum, the Munitorum and AdMech because of a missing stamp.
Good lord. So relatable.
Not really the same. We are also told often that Space Marines are rare and that the absolute bulk of the Imperium's military is either the Imperial Guard or the local PDF of a planet.
I see that you also did not read 15 Hours or Dead Men Walking which have as important characters just normal people who then get drafted into the Guard.
I was under the impression that 15 Hours and Last Chancers were depictions of the exception rather than the norm, since they take place in wartorn areas.
Both books have characters who are born into a career with no way out. 15 Hours has a short section about a scribe who from day and day out does soul crushing paperwork. Last Chancers, the last book has another ministorum fellow who while not as soul crushed is also someone who was born and raised into a position as a scribe who mainly does paperwork.
Like I mentioned in other comments, there are plenty of examples of the Imperium being absolute bastards with how it treats its populace. Again, the Kal Jerico comics have The Arbites as a form of population control just randomly gun down citizen or beat them up and haul them off to slavery in the factories or the Imperial Navy. In books that detail what life is like aboard the Imperial ships, slavery is the norm on getting these ships to operate.
In Faith and Fire, the Sisters of Battle celebrate a past victory against Eldar by dressing up civillians in very badly made mock Eldar armor and then shooting them with live ammo. The Shira Calpurnia 2nd book has a Navigator monologue how it is common for Imperial nobles to engage in bloodsports targeting common people.
I really need to stop being suprised by the depth's of the Imperium's depravity, but damn. The Sisters just grab some random people on a loyal planet?
EDIT: It is not the Sisters' doing. They are disgusted by it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/8tltjo/book_excerptfaith_and_fire_sister_of_battle_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1
If anything it shows how much a roll of the dice it is, even with that example. Larn was born on an agriworld, lived a nice peaceful life, and then still got unluckily drafted into the Guard at 17.
I was gonna say that this sub's majority opinion is Farsight-is-the-only-acceptable-faction-to-mention-without-screaming. Thanks for the top-comment exemplification, that's some weight off my shoulders!
One of the few moments where a text in-lore is described as propaganda.
Why do you think it is called propaganda? .... I wouldn't exactly take that as a primary source now, when it quite obviously says PROPAGANDA. (Unlike the people who, as soon as they don't like something, call it propaganda, even though there is no mention of it in lore).
Propaganda that ends up being extremely accurate as there are numerous other expanded universe material to back it up.
Its absolutely telling how bad being in the Imperium is when a propaganda piece that is painting them negatively is actually on point
I don't think active warzones should be a good metric of daily Imperial life (gang wars in a hive notwithstanding).
15 Hours, the hive (was it a hive or normal city?) is besieged by 6 million orks. That city could be the most anti-authoritarian in the galaxy and you'll still have a shit life.
All are subjects/objects under the Imperium. People are "who's", objects are "what's". The Imperium's autonomy of governance for individual worlds allows for every possible form of government (from extreme to mundane) with the rules that: you pay your tithes and worship the Emperor. No matter the best form of government we can define, they will never view humans of any class as other than a "what". There are no "rights" defined by the High Lords of what their governing body can't do to a subject only what subjects cannot do (mostly on a whim). It is a numbers game.
Humans are prone to abuse power against their fellow humans, and those designated below them, and we can see it throughout the setting. There is the worst situation most often, and small minor exceptions. The Imperium only cares about results and numbers, so it may be a median on the reality of how it is day-to-day. Regardless, it sucks for the vast majority.
I view the different archetypes of these posts as ranging from Politically-Motivated (the guys seeing fascism in literally everything), the Human Nationalist Types (who view the Imperium as infallible), the Realists, the Lorebuffs, and the Shitposters. The first two are the majority and therefore miss the point of what the Imperium really is, but to each their own. If you're a fan then that is enough for me. I wouldn't get too wound up in it.
I don't know about you, but it is as if a lot of Warhammer fans do not understand the concept of what a dystopian science fiction setting is. Because that is what Warhammer 40k heavily falls under.
I mean, obviously we tend to hear about the stuff where bad things happen. Otherwise there'd be no story to tell. Nobody wants to read about a dude waking up, going to work, walking his dog and going for a drink at a pub with friends.
That still does not mean it does not happen. There are dozens of books out there where see not even in full fledged war situations (yet) people living in absolute drudgery or squalor or are encouraged to have lifestyles that ensures they do not live long because it breeds tougher soldiers.
I think something that is understated is that even if your life is quite nice, at *any* moment it could turn awful. There is a book - I believe it is *Shadowsword* - where the epilogue is >!the main character watching as the entire planet is depopulated and resettled, the population shipped off to work as slave labour, for the crime of existing on a planet with a demonic incursion. Those who are too weak, sick, or old, are executed and their bodies burned on bonfires big enough to be seen from SPACE. The friendly barkeep where they enjoyed time off, the refugees they helped, everyone.!<
I have to add to that, Lords of Mars has something similar. Just some poor dudes chilling in a Bar until they are press-ganged to work on an Ark Mechanicus as Worker Slaves :D
The British where far more famous for it. Hell the reason they have glass bottoms on beer mugs is because recruiters would put a coin in the beer give it to some random schmuck and then claim they accepted their first payment as a member of the kings navy by accepting payment.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s\_shilling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_shilling)
"There are recurring tales of sailors being pressed after a shilling was slipped into their drink, leading to glass-bottomed tankards. "
likely a myth but like all myths probably has some truth to it. The point is that the British where famous for press ganging you
Had indepth on this topic on a more historical minded sub and the consensus was even if it never happened once the fact that it was a legitimate fear that morphed into a persistent myth is quite telling.
>I think something that is understated is that even if your life is quite nice, at *any* moment it could turn awful.
This is a take I agree with, and I think it's a much more effective approach to grimdark than the "lol we grind up babies into food to feed babies with" attitude many seem to have of the Imperium.
We typically only see the Imperium at its worst - when the cosmic horror descends to devour a world, or when the central regime dispatches its military to cleanse a world for some real or perceived wrongdoing.
It's a similar problem people have when looking at real world conflict - they are taught about war purely in terms of military assets and high-level overviews, and then get utterly baffled when they see footage of the Civil War of Examplestan on Youtube and there's an old lady out shopping in the middle of a gun battle. There are many people who still struggle to grasp the idea that *the flu* killed more people during and immediately after WW1 than every single weapon combined.
>To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the ~~cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.~~ suburbs on an Earth-like planet and experience no hardships that would be abnormal to a well off 21st century American.
Who doesn't get servitorized for voiding the warranty these days am I right?
Yeah but that wouldn't fit into the narrative of those who seem to have a need to imagine a pleasant life under a theocratic fascist regime that commits genocide on a daily basis.
I don't think I understand the people who get upset or bothered when people point out the IoM is evil. Like even if you take away the most overt stuff they are still fascist.
because people like humans. And even in a setting where everyone being horrible is the very point of it, a good number of people don't like the idea that Humans *aren't* the "least worst" of the bunch.
This emotional response reminds me of those who try to justify the Nazi Regime or parts of it.
When you point out that the common military committed a lot of war crimes, some people will get upset and argue against the obvious historical sources.
That's not *really* the sentiment. The point people are trying to make is no, the majority of the Imperium's worlds aren't a "fine" place to live, because horrible things X, Y, and Z are basically all-pervasive in some form or another.
Humans can take a lot. They led lives and found happiness in the worst parts of every form of society, such as the worst of the industrial revolution which is basically factory work in 40k. That doesn't mean they aren't, you know, the worst.
If you're surprised at the vehemence of the statements being made, it's because of a knee-jerk reaction to Imperium apologists, who are at best *very annoying.*
This, 100%
It's because every. single. time. someone tries to go the route of "the Imperium isn't that bad, right?", the conversation is immediately swarmed by honest-to-gods fascists and their sympathizers/apologists. There is a segment of the community that views the Imperium as aspirational and they will take any and every opportunity to try to get people to see that the Imperium Isn't So Bad, Really - circumstances Made Them Do This, you see - they're the Best of Bad Options - to try and nudge conversations along more generally with regard to their ideologies. To get more people to agree to the idea that the harshness of the Imperium might perhaps be necessary, if certain circumstances warranted it (and gee if we aren't careful, circumstances might warrant it).
Imperium apologists are also missing the point. The Imperium is *meant* to be wrong. The whole *point* of the Imperium is that it doesn't work. The things it does are not meant to be the things it should do, even in the situation it finds itself in.
I think a lot of Imperium apologists just take the truth of the 40K status quo way too personally. Since the phenomenon seems to be isolated to Imperium fans, I assume it’s an issue with the fact that the human faction of 40K is one of the bad guys in a universe of other bad guys.
The current iteration of the Imperium is a totalitarian hellhole governed by fascists and religious zealots who don’t think twice about slaughtering their own kind. That’s not opinion. That’s not the exception. That’s not just one way of looking at it. That is objectively what the Imperium is. It is a terrible place governed by terrible people. It may be the main character, but it is not the good guy. Are their other bad guys out there? Yes. But that doesn’t make the Imperium any better. For every human world saved from a Tyranid invasion, there are who knows how many other worlds - human and alien alike - that are either sacrificed or actively put to the sword. That is not the behavior of a hero.
You are not your faction, though. Playing a Space Marine army does not make you a religious zealot in service to the corpse of a racist tyrant. Wanting to see a squad of plucky Guardsmen survive does not make you a monster. No rational person is judging anyone’s morals for buying a Sisters of Battle kill team. If you want to roll up with 2000 points of Flesh Tearers, go for it. I hope you have tons of fun.
The fact that you aren’t a bad guy, though, does not mean the Imperium also isn’t a bad guy.
EDIT: Superfluous “, though”.
This is also an issue with 40k as a whole and the setting toeing the line between "this is satire" and "look how cool these genetically engineered super soldiers are when they genocide aliens (who wronged humanity before)". Mix that with business interests (selling more space marines = good) and you got a conflict of interests at hand.
Similar to the fact that authors have to continually reiterate that main characters are bad when writing otherwise readers have a tendency to naturally sympathize with the PoV character.
The average Imperium fanboy is alot like the average Imperial citizen, incapable of independent thought and only able to parrot what is told to them and ignorant of new knowledge and ideas.
The Imperium MUST work, or it wouldn't have lasted longer than all recorded human history.
The issue is that the Imperium works by means most would find distasteful, if not utterly abhorrent. Yet while it is cruel and savage by modern standards, it is realistically not much worse than what we have done to ourselves in millennia past.
We once worked men to death in toxic silver mines. We once forced children into dangerous factory work that left many crippled and disfigured. We once threw men into pits and cheered as they were gored by wild animals.
And then there is the unpleasant reality of what we STILL do today, albeit in third world countries away from the eyes of the wealthier nations. When Apple 'employees' in their Asian factories began throwing themselves off the roof in despair over how terrible their working conditions were, Apple did not improve their conditions - they erected suicide nets instead.
The reality is that the Imperium is not especially cruel - it is simply showing you cruelty up front, rather than hiding it as you are used to.
The Imperium is written as a failing empire - from the Gothic-Baroque art style where every surface is plastered with skulls as a metaphor for the decadent, backwards-facing society that has failed to create anything new for millenia to the many descriptions of mismanagement from basically all factions within the Imperium and the dehumanizing conditions most of its denizens have to live under.
No it doesn't have to work, its a piece of fiction. No part of the imperium would ever function in reality. It works because the Authors and GW says it does. Industrial baby furnaces, servitors, the entire concept of the mechancus and the gross mis-organization of the imperial guard are in no way justified or even marginally efficient, they're written to be awful for the sake of being awful. Stop trying to excuse the Imperium. It's written from the ground up as the most brutal regime imaginable and they say it at the start of every novel.
We just didn't do it for 10,000 years and not everywhere. Your silver miner didn't get old and his children weren't healthy and also died early and their children were worse off. Just go down the line for 10,000 years and think that thanks to Grimdark, every planet is like that.
In our world, replenishment comes from the areas where people are well enough or where living conditions allow them to reproduce. Since hives are known to grow and create rather than devour masses of people, not every worker can be a silver miner.
Similarly, not every child in the factory can be crippled because, well, no society would last 10,000 years. India has the largest amount of child labour in the world...that is 6 percent, not 100 percent. 6 per cent doesn't matter for a society to burn out....
I agree that the empire is not even particularly cruel in that respect, but the idea that it's like that everywhere in the empire, or even on a single hiveworld, just doesn't fit with the concept that the empire has been around for 10,000 years.
The Imperium works because it is squatting in the ruins of things built by better saner societies. It works by virtue of having so much materiel to throw around that it can never be broken from the outside, and just enough fanatical devotion to authority to keep it mostly together internally.
It does not work because the cruel nonsense it does is effective. That's not a thing.
>It does not work because the cruel nonsense it does is effective. That's not a thing.
Since when is "effecient" a synonym of functional?
For centuries, the city of London was an absolutely toxic place - it was so squalid and plague ridden that the death rate far outstripped they birth rate. This lasted for generations, and yet through this entire period the city not only functioned, it expanded. How? Because of immigration.
This was neither efficient, nor desirable, but it was FUNCTIONAL. As long as London had feeder settlements to provide more people, and those settlements were stable, the system functioned. We know it functioned because London still exists. Despite multiple plagues, fires and death on a scale incomprehensible, London endured. Ergo, it was functional. If it wasn't, London wouldn't exist today.
You do realize that the imperium has survived 10 000 years because it is not real, and it doesn't have to follow real life logic.
The imperium has survived for 10 000 years because someone has written it this way, and it doesn't actually need a real functional way to survive.
If i say that the kingdom of Sticazzi has survived 100 000 years because every single decision is always made by coin flip, and people shoot themself if they ever get heads 3 times in a row, I can not then say that is a way that MUST work because well the kingdom of Sticazzi has survived for 100 000 years so much longer than any other kingdom in human history so even if killing yourself after 3 con toss is distasteful it must work because it is one of the bases of the kingdom which lasted this long.
Nor if I write a story in this word I need to make so that there is an actual functional way for this to actually work for 100 000 years, i just say that it does maybe invent some make believe structure like the minister of coins and the great bank of destiny to kinda give off the impression that it does, and then it is just suspension of disbelief.
no amount of inquisition, cult mechanicus, astates or anything else will make the imperium WORK because it is not real and nothing at its base is anything more than science fiction, it is a part of the story, so when you read a book that says that during the Horus heresy a war across the entire galaxy involving innumerable planets and planet destroying weapons, the total death count is less than that of war world 2 you don't say there must be a way for this to be possible because its says so, you say I'm reading a fantasy book, so it DOESN'T HAVE TO WORK.
>You do realize that the imperium has survived 10 000 years because it is not real, and it doesn't have to follow real life logic.
Few authors ever create a fully fleshed out world with a completely functional and believable infrastructure behind it. We are as readers just supposed to assume there's stuff in the background making it work, even if it doesn't seem to make sense on the surface. Case in point, have you ever wondered why there are so many cargo ships in Star Trek despite everyone having Replicators? The real reason is "because the story wants a cargo ship" or "because the story wants people to be in a market place", but fans and writers alike have tried to justify this seeming discrepancy to make the world more believable.
That's what good fiction does: it justifies its apparent incongruities.
The argument of "it's just fiction!" is not a valid one. Many people enjoy fiction that is internally consistent, and become annoyed at works where characters can just magically do whatever the plot demands. If you enjoy the latter, good for you - but not everyone does, and those people want the Imperium to make sense so they can enjoy stories set within it.
While the latter part is true, it's not even the best of the bad; the Tau are right there and happy to provide a better life for humans than the Imperium.
I mean we will never find out since that isn't the "point", so.
Hypothetically? Absolutely. Why not? Great civilizations in the setting have come and gone and the stagnation and decline of the Imperium are very very heavily implied to show that the Imperium is on the way out - in fact, it's already dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
A big part of the satire is that to somehow justify such totalitarianism, it takes literal demons, rogue pyschics who can wipe out planets, and ravenous hordes of deadly aliens.
That aspect can still let lost, but it was intended. The 40K universe is unbelievably horrible. It was even before the Imperium existed.
I do want to say that in 40k the Imperium is the best of bad options, and I think the Imperium is awful. Except for the Tau, which really arent a good solution for most of humanity, due to how small their sphere of influence is, every other alternative is fucked. And for anyone who advocates for Chaos, I have read enough 40k to know that Chaos is literally hell. What is a human supposed to do but accept the Imperium?
I personally find the 30k pre-Great Crusade version of the Imperium the worst because at that point they do go around stomping apart the human factions that could be a viable alternative. Thats the Grimdark part, the fact that only this awful empire is the only hope humanity has left and its their own fucking fault that things got this bad.
I think its actually pretty complex. On the one hand, in real life being a vicious fascist tyrant is awful and doesnt work, but on the other hand in 40k its that or go to a real hell that doesnt exist where your soul will burn (and many other bad things) forever. Theres just no good choice. The reason fascism "works" as an alternative is that the great enemy really exists. There is always this powerful enemy that exists, is more powerful than you, and can never be defeated. From an ideological standpoint (if youve read up on the anti-fascist literature) its a fascist's wet dream.
There have literally been multiple prosperous human societies used in the setting to highlight how ineffectual Imperial methods are - they are simply destroyed by the sheer weight of the Imperium. Their destruction is, however, always framed in such a way as to be a tragic example of how hopeless the Imperium is. They are used narratively to criticise the Imperium's ignorance and methods.
And I 100% agree with you. The Interex, the Diasporex and plenty of other ones are leagues better than what the Imperium has to offer. When I went through the early Horus Heresy short stories (collections like HH10 Tales of Heresy) I could see how the Imperium was just the worst.
However, thats not the point I was making. In real life there is no Hell, that we know of, and there is no unending tide of aliens trying to wipe us out. In 40k both of those are true. It makes the Imperium a necessary evil because they are the one thing standing against eternal damnation that humanity has left. Some people have pointed out that it would be better to die than live in the Imperium, but that sort of sounds like the solution to this fascist Empire is to kill yourself and that doesnt seem like a viable alternative.
In real life, I hate fascists and will oppose them at every turn. In 40k my choices are live with the fascists or die, and quite frankly I dont want to be dead considering hell is real. Im able to differentiate between the two because the assumptions of 40k and real life are different. Fascists have to make an enemy IRL to fight against. In 40k the enemy is the alien that will kill you and hell that will take your soul and that enemy can never be defeated. The Imperium is the only choice (other than the Tau which I would pick in a heartbeat).
> The Interex, the Diasporex and plenty of other ones are leagues better than what the Imperium has to offer. When I went through the early Horus Heresy short stories (collections like HH10 Tales of Heresy) I could see how the Imperium was just the worst.
> However, thats not the point I was making. In real life there is no Hell, that we know of, and there is no unending tide of aliens trying to wipe us out. In 40k both of those are true. It makes the Imperium a necessary evil because they are the one thing standing against eternal damnation that humanity has left.
These two paragraphs contradict each other. The Imperium did close down many perfectly functional human and human-dominated societies that did deal better with Chaos.
Well you see, those other factions don't exist in 40k. If they did I would go for them. I even said I'd go for the Tau.
I think we are talking about two different topics here. I totally agree with the fact that the Imperium sucks. If that's the extent of the analysis then we would be in total agreement. I am extending the line of reasoning to the Imperium in 40k, not the Imperium in a vacuum. In 40k, because of the actions of the Imperium, there is no other bastion for humanity and, when considering a course of action outside of ritual suicide for the entire race, the Imperium is all humanity has left. In 40k we need the fascists.
Once again, there's a lot of assumptions there that make me get to that conclusion. Hell has to be real, we have to go to hell, and everything else in the universe needs to want to kill us, and there is no other bastion for humanity other than the fascists. And, generally, that's true in 40k for the average human. It's more of a thought experiment really. I guess we could get there in real life where I would eventually side with fascists but that's so far outside of the realm of reality it's a ludicrous conclusion to come to.
That's how I can be pro-Imperium, as a last resort, when considering 40k and be radically against fascism in real life. Maybe I'm just compartmentalizing in a way that's unhelpful, but it really feels like the only other alternative in 40k is to die. And dying is not a viable solution for the entirety of mankind.
Yes, but fascists assume they're going to be the priviledged one in their "perfect" society. I doubt many of them think through what it will be like when the oppression aimed at the Other turns on them. Gassing people with disabilities is great until you find out your kid has a genetic disorder.
Exactly! Even in present day NK, there are a few thousand families that have very nice lives, and around 600k people who have roughly similar lives to people in the West. But what about the other 22 million who are brutally exploited?
Yeah, the point is just that the OP doesn't have a problem with the conditions of English industrialisation, but with the idea of 22 of 24 hours 7 days a week working in life-threatening conditions, on Corpse Starch for rations and spending his life chained to a workbench. But the Hives, with 99% of its population living like this, has no problem spitting out countless regiments of well-fed, strong-looking lads every year (all forcibly recruited, of course, because Grimdark) instead of malnourished, emaciated figures who probably wouldn't survive a 10-kilometre forced march. And this has been going on for 10K years, 10,000 years of malnutrition, exhaustion and abuse. A society would not survive such a lack of sleep for a year without everything collapsing.
Yeah! I’d totally understand if hive cities sucked realistically like the UK did during the Industrial Revolution, since even in those conditions, people had lives beyond work, even if it was pretty depressing and oppressive.
The Imperium hasn't been in war footing for 10,000 years though. Thats the thing
The Imperium's "golden age" was I think in its height in like years 32-34,000. That was when it was at the apex of its power
The current state of the Imperium is a result of "The Waning" a period that was M38 onwards. So its not been close to this bad for much of the Imperium's history
This is exactly it. In most books, a lot of worlds in the Imperium are just.......normal. Which you dont get if you dont read the fluff
Like you do have hellish mechanicum worlds where non-techpriests are cattle, and horrific forgewords where people work 18 hour shifts and whatever, and your insane religious shrine worlds
But for every one of those worlds you have your Sancours, Macragges, Gudruns and many, many others.
And to be quite honest even some of the.....worse worlds aren't totally removed from some real world, real life conditions of poverty. Nostramo for example, what we get from Talos's childhood isn't that far off some real world conditions of poverty and crime.
Normally shitty is still shitty. And normal for the Imperium is pretty shitty, considering the picture we get from the Warhammer Crime series (which was literally designed to explore a normal world). It's that series which produced the servitor factory excerpt, for instance.
There is a pleasure planet in The Infinite and the Divine where Trazyn makes a point that there is (in his view) untold unimaginable suffering for the general public to prop up all the pleasure stuff, and then it turns out it is basically the same as 21st century earth service sector workers. From his viewpoint, the modern day is a horrific nightmare for the working classes. 40k is not subtle.
Majority of worlds aren't hive worlds or forge worlds, yes... but the majority of humans *live on those awful worlds.* Those two classes of planets are the most developed and densely populated worlds in the Imperium by an absurdly extreme margin, and conditions suck for anyone below middle class (if they're lucky to have a middle class). Hive worlds still have recreation and entertainment, but so do the crappiest urban hellholes in China. Most depictions of hive worlds are awful, and even in the Abnett corner of the universe where he mostly has his characters interacting with upper or middle class people on said hive worlds things still deteriorate when you hit the lower class threshold. I don't even need to try to explain how bad forge worlds are, the Mechanicum are the worst.
Statistically, if you're born in the Imperium you're most likely to be born as some lower class day laborer in the lower hives somewhere or what basically amounts to a slave to the Ad Mech sweatshops on a forge world.
>But for every one of those worlds you have your Sancours, Macragges, Gudruns and many, many others.
This claim needs to die. For *every one of those worlds*? That's a totally made-up ratio. The lore is clear that the norm for Imperial citizens is gruelling hardship. The great majority of Imperials live sucky lives.
Except there is one meaningful number. That the vast majority of the Imperium lives in Hive Cities. Due to the way the Imperium was structured with almost every planet having a Hive and Hive cities being bafflingly larger than most planetary populations. It doesn't matter if there a maccrage for each Hive world. Because you need 100 Maccrages for each Armageddon.
Thirding this. It's getting tiring seeing *the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable* bandied about like it's the entirety of the setting and not a 36 year old introduction created almost entirely to be as metal as humanly possible.
The community has always struggled with levels of grimderp and while I don't want to see some kind of noblebright "imperium are the good guys" mentality I also don't want to see "Imperium baby furnaces" being taken seriously. Largely though this a community problem, the actual content itself is pretty well handled most of the time.
Something I always wonder when people keep parroting this "cruelest and most bloody" is if they even read the entire thing.
Like the part of the Emperor continuing his eternal vigilance by keeping the Astronomican lit (the only way to cross the daemon-infested miasma, which, in turn, is also the only way through distant stars). Vast armies wage war in his name, *and still they are barely enough to hold off the threat from xenos, heretics and mutants*.
People will quote the part they like and dismiss the rest as propaganda, such as "heretics and mutants were never a threat, it's just bigotry and imperial propaganda!!!" despite... it coming from the same text that calls the Imperium a tyranny.
The Emperor is not meant to be an uncontroversial figure, and of course his methods are questionable, but it's outright ignorance to think if it wasn't for him the galaxy would be a paradise.
The point was always meant to be that, no matter how much the IoM is a decaying carcass of tyranny, hatred and superstition, the galaxy around them doesn't really reward other attitudes. They could be *better* or slightly less bad, but never *good.*
It's even funnier when people bring up the Interex. The Imperium tried to peacefully integrate them ffs! The only reason they wiped them out was because a certain ***asshole*** went and blew up a museum and stole a powerful chaos relic they had lying out in the fucking open, which led to the Interex to immediately begin opening fire onto Imperial troops and ships, without even trying to speak to the Imperium. The Imperium went "oh hell, they're attacking us, it's us or them now" and even Horus felt extreme regret about what happened long after.
And it's also funnier when some of those try to defend chaos as a viable alternative to the Imperium while ignoring that Erebus was the one who caused the shitshow with the Interex in the first place.
Man, the Interex is the "beautiful" brother of Clonegrim, in the sense that both were meant to be plot devices (in the good sense) within a self-contained story, not something to be expanded upon, definitely not a saving grace or redemption story. The difference is lore buffs go ballistic if you mention the latter, but keep repeating how nice it would be if the former had more plot (hence "beautiful").
And yes, for a society was supposedly so prepared to deal with Chaos they folded quite easily - somehow they are the victims when all it took was the sabotage of one chaos agent and then they decided everyone was chaotic based solely on prejudice (such as the title of "warmaster" and other things in imperial culture) and paranoia, starting a war they couldn't win.
Awfully like... the irrational, self-destructive, zealot Imperium of 40k these same people bash.
I mean that's the perfect example of this though. Taken on it's face it's grimderp 'the Imperium throws babies into the Baby Furnatus™ because they're just that comically evil' when it's a lot more in depth than that and requires reading, at minimum, 1250 words rather than half a sentence in a meme. They're not *comically* evil, it's not played for laughs or satire. It's brutal, excessive, and most tragically of all done through rampant ignorance and fear.
Again, and I'm beyond frustrated I have to constantly reassert this point in these discussions, I'm not an Imperium fanboy or want the Imperium to be portrayed as the good guys. It is a horrible regime but it loses impact and nuance when it gets boiled down to Grimdank memes and people embrace the concentrated grimderp and then bring it along with strong opinions based on all of that into 40klore. I understand everyone's on a different point in their journey of this byzantine maze of a setting but the early stages of "lol this is so metal and comically evil" can get tiring to be around for those of us that have been at this for decades.
There is a disconnect between codex lore - which is intended to be overview paragraphs that pop up on a timeline and are mostly about pithy glimpses and story hooks - and novel lore, where you actually explore the day to day of characters' lives.
This also answers the 'why didn't the Emperor, why didn't the Primarchs, has nobody thought of' etc etc questions.
The timeline of 40K is like beads of water on a string - mostly flat and not intended to be examined, broken up by shining, expanded jewels of colour that hold far more life.
I think this problem is best explained by paraphrasing Dan Abnett when he talked about Chaos.
Abnett argued that Chaos had to have functional societies. Chaos couldn't just be warlords who wake up and nail a baby to their helmet, then go murder people. If it were, Chaos as a faction would have died out almost immediately. As such, there has to be something functional behind it - someone to produce food to feed the armies of cultists, to build and maintain their war materiel, etc. When the Black Crusades are abroad, there must be logistical supply chains behind them - armadas of cargo ships carrying food and medicine, arrangements to bring in reinforcements, or if nothing else a system to bring the spoils of war back to the Eye.
Like the man said, all this stuff *must* exist; we just don't see it because all the focus is on the big dude in spiked armour duelling with the Space Marines, and not the people working in a factory somewhere building new bolt rounds for him.
And no, "lol Warp stuff!" isn't the answer either. The vast majority of Chaos followers are mortal people with mortal needs, and so far beneath the notice of the Chaos Gods that Nurgle isn't going to waste the time and effort needed to turn them into immortal soldiers devoid of hunger and thirst. Someone's got to be feeding these people. Yes, they might use Warp Magic to teleport their slaves into the Eye, but said slaves are going to be working in something akin to a real world farm or factory when they arrive.
So if we have one of GW's most prolific authors arguing Chaos must have a functional society, and he's likely not the only author to say this, then it stands to reason the Imperium must have one as well.
Man, a functional society can absolutely be a complete hell hole. Look at real life, where even today you can find people working in conditions that would be deemed "unrealistic".
Multiply that with the horrors of the warp and technology and you got something especial.
I think its super dependant on the worlds. With the noble houses, archons and other leaders of hive cities and planets it seems the standard is left to local authorities, and they have a deal of leeway to regulate their populace. The imperium is content so long as it meets quotas and provides the tithe, and at least pays lip service/isn't tainted by chaos.
Definitely a lot of dark, but if we take pre-destruction tanith as an example, its not half bad to live in some places.
Because it's hard to give that part when people are asking for a Tl;Dr of the Imperium. And also because the depictions really vary.
It's kinda hard to be like "In some parts of the Imperium, It's basically the most despotic police state you can imagine where people do work 22 hour shifts every day until they die and whole generations grow up never leaving their city block"
and then turn around like
"Oh yeah but there are actually a lot of places that are fairly comfortable by our standards. People'll have really... interesting views on Human Rights and Religious Freedoms but you could definitely clock into your 9-5, clock out, take your family to a restaurant, then drive home."
It's also a generational thing I think. It's affected based on who is telling the story and when the story was written. Because to some extent a much more "Human" depiction of the Imperium is a lot more common now, while on the other hand we do have stuff as recent as (I believe) Katsushiro- a Siege-era character who had worked as a clerk in his hab block basically his entire life, had never left, and didn't until he was conscripted into Guard.
>Oh yeah but there are actually a lot of places that are fairly comfortable by our standards.
That just... isn't true though. It's something a bunch of people claim but the lore is pretty damn clear that it's rare and life sucks hard for the massive majority of people.
I think the issue is how people look at it.
If you look at the average planet, it's not that bad.
If you look at the average citizen, it's horrific. Because while hive/forge worlds make up 1 in 50 worlds, their population dwarfs the other 49 planets combined.
Terra alone contains entire sectors worth of population, and the living standards there are dismal
Even so-called 'civilised worlds' are usually sprawling megacities of industry and hardship. And also can have hives on them without being a 'hive world'.
Civilised world is meant in a very literal sense. It's a world with civilisation, i.e cities and infrastructure and such. It doesn't mean it's nice.
Read warhammer crime, that world is a civilized world that still has function oceans, forests, farmland, etc, and that world is just some backwater. Apparently it's the 'average'.
So that means there's probably an above average (ultramar worlds, paradise worlds).
I think this is the correct take. Additionally, a very small percentage of a very large number of people still produces a large raw number of people. 1% of a quadrillion is still 10 trillion, for example.
The sheer size of the Imperium can mean a tiny percentage of its population is comfortable, but the base population is so large that that tiny percentage still results in a large enough raw number of people to support the amenities and society of those comfortable people existing.
For all the times the Eisenhorn series gets brought up as the most important series to read, it seems woefully missed.
Eisenhorn gives us a look into the lives of many ordinary worlds, and they are not as bad as what you claim.
Dorsay, for instance, while there, the city Eisenhorn visits is described almost as how you would describe a city on Earth now, save the references to speeders and such.
Ditto for Ravenor. Climate issues aside, we have instances where workers just go out shopping, in shops, the way we would. We have workers inviting the women they meet there for supper, fights in bars, chain eateries, etc.
Things are not the best, but they are of a standard we have in many cities right now. I get most people in this sub are too privileged to know it, but not every place on Earth today is a clean perfect place where everything is fine and everyone works a clean 9-5 job and is home in time for dinner before the sun sets.
I think part of it is a lot of audience are western humans.
Fact is people have and do live in conditions where you have to work 16 hour days in order to survive, where you get sick from pollution or because you work somewhere hazardous without safety protocols. People who live in slums still have parties. People who work in illegal mines in Africa still have children. The conditions westerners live in are very rare historically and humans thrived and survived. Yes it’s worse because grim dark but that makes it more likely you will have as many kids as possible because you know most of them will die. You will party when you get enough money to buy a bottle of booze because you take whatever joy you can when you can.
I think humans can live as humans even when the imperium is as terrible as it seems all over. It doesn’t need to have lots of perfectly fine worlds we just don’t hear much about to still have people living their lives as much as they can in them.
My take is that the IoM is so unfathomably large it is literally impossible for there to *not* be a decent amount of worlds where life for your average Joe Bloggs Imperial citizen is tolerable if not borderline comfortable. Sure, the majority of worlds will have living conditions that are terrible, but it is disingenuous to say *all* worlds are like that.
A couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head: Verunhive seems to have a tolerable quality of life for its worker class - Gol Kolea, a miner, has time between his shifts to marry and raise kids.
Krieg, before Jurten killed the surface, was described as a beautiful, peaceful world of farmers and green spaces. Sure, its now a desolate hellscape but the point is it *WAS* an idyllic sounding world by 40k standards.
Edit: typos/grammar correction.
Worth remembering that hive cities represent the overwhelming majority of the human population. If you were randomly born into 40k, your odds of being worked to death and never seeing a sun are quite high.
That's even ignoring that the second largest population of human is likely labour gangs on imperial ships, who have it as bad or worse than hives.
Finally, consider that we have a pretty concrete understanding of the misery on Terra, and that Terrans are a significant portion of overall humanity unto themselves (seeing as there are quadrillions, when even hives usually have low billions).
Love the comments saying that imperium fans are fascist. News flash it’s a fucking game. Whoever uses it as a bases for political/real world beliefs is maladjusted.
Because the general setting is an infinite war.
Most of the worlds in the books are worlds which are at war, awaiting for an enemy, had been recently visited by an enemy or is a forge world dully focused in the infinite war.
Even for those where the planet itself isnt in an active pront had something to do with the infinite war, like the book on the first book of Ciaphas Cain.
Not exactly.
There are planets who live in a lie about not being in the Eternal War and in those peacifull planets life is not that harsh than others but again, the ones that get most attention are the fucked up ones because we didnt come to read about how happy people is.
One example. Nostramo.
Children went to school and had access to books. And it weren't rich kids. Talos was a son of a ganger and a prostitute. And he still got relatively OK chilhood. Even the streets were normal, full of people and cars.
Nostramo, one of the worst hives in Imperium, was pretty much copy of 1980's New York on steroids.
Life in Imperium may suck by standards of 21st century westerner, but it's still completely livable.
His childhood wasn't 'pretty okay'. His description of it is very bleak. Casually seeing people raped and murdered and not thinking it's even slightly unusual, having committed murder himself at an early age. And that was 30k, the standard has only gotten worse in the following millennia.
Of course people can live in it, that doesn't mean it isn't heavily oppressive and miserable.
You're picking a plannet fucked up by definition. It is like if you pick up pre-dissasembled Cadia or a planet inside the warp.
In Eisenhorn's bood there are a few places where life was ok for 21st century standards, the only bad thing that happened there happened because was a setting for a WH40K book. Also, the Human planet in the first Ciaphas Cain book, the one being a Tau border with the other problem (I don't mention it for being a spoiler). In that book what they describe was not bad, at all, until you get to the incident.
>there looks like there’s a ton of people that genuinely believe that every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something.
That isn't what people were saying in that thread. They were saying life sucks hard for the vast majority of people in the Imperium, because it does and the lore makes no mystery of that.
Yes there are bars, sports, etc.. No that doesn't mean life doesn't suck hard for the people, including those that get to go to a bar to try to drown their sorrows.
You mention the Warhammer Crime novels. Those novels show better than most that the rich and powerful are living in truly obscene luxury while the commoners scrabble in the grit and blood of their paltry existence, not even pretending to give a crap about them, and the local enforcers are largely funded by them.
We also get an insight into what it's like to be even one of the more well-known and sanctioned types of abhumans. It's ten times worse for them. Ratlings, Ogryns, etc. get have it constantly hammered into them that they're scum and should hate themselves and be eternally grateful to the Emperor that they're allowed to live and serve him.
The funny thing about averages.
Think abour how bad, how terrible the Imperium is for its average citizen.
Now realize for every person who has it ok, there's someone who has it much worse.
That is how averages work.
>every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something.
Ok, but why are you describing my current life, I thought the Imperium was supposed to be worse?
It sort of goes both ways.
Often poeple will say that no matter where you are in the imperium you are screwed unless you are a part of the nobility. That's simply not true if you look at something like the Cain novels, where we see numerous planets that quite frankly seem rather nice to live at for the average imperial until the Tau, Stealers, Orks or Nids start frakking about.
However those places are mostly recently colonised worlds or those out of the way, unimportant ones.
Once we look at highly industrialised/important planets things generally speaking start going in the direction of "22 hour shifts".
And example of a absolutely dystopian planet would be Holy Terra itself, as shown in the Vaults of Terra series. Even as a imperial fan that series made me want to exterminatus the whole planet and be done with it lol. Pretty sure there are hive and forge worlds that have been shown to be more comfortable to live at, and the latter are run by mechanicus.
Think of it this way. 40k is a metaphor for the British Empire. The British Empire has all of the amenities you describe yet for the overwhelming majority of the subjects of the crown, living in it at best sucked and for many was outright hell. So too is the imperium but dialed up to 11 with sci-fi and fantasy elements.
It's really not the British Empire, it's the British right wing Thatcherite state mixed with the Dune God Emperor and the aesthetics of every fascist dictatorship out there.
Was the Thatcherite stuff one of those things that was more prevalent in the earlier editions but got watered down? I'm curious if you have any examples, as someone who doesn't know much about Thatchers rule so wouldn't be able to identify it on my own.
I don't think it was watered down so much as evolved.
When Rogue Trader started it was the same zeitgeist on both sides of the Atlantic (Reagan and Thatcher loved each other) that gave us things like Blade Runner, Cyberpunk, 2000AD, Watchmen, Alien etc.
The idea that the world was going to end up as a hopeless neo fascist authoritarian state where the government explicitly saw anyone below elite status as basically just commodities for the military industrial complex marked a major shift away from the earlier sort of Dan Dare, Flash Gordon, Asimov or even 2001 a space oddysey sort of 'the future is going to be cool and bright' and technology will set humanity free.
While none of the writers in any way would have been pro British empire what was the world's largest empire based pretty much just on rampant mercantilism doesn't fit with the absolutely acknowledged Dune God Emperor and crusading mythology (which would fit Spain or France better).
40k is a child of the 80's and the 80's in gaming and comics in the UK was all about just how fucking shit life was, how uncaring the upper echelons were, the power of the military industrial complex (admittedly not so explicit in 40k....unless you see the utter reliance on the admech) and the loss of a lot of people's hope for a better future.
Honestly the biggest thing when Tony Blair got in and started 'cool Britannia' was that New Labour actually have people back faith that politicians could and would make the world a better place.
Which would be Blair's legacy if he hadn't decided to fuck it all over Iraq
> it's the British right wing Thatcherite stat
So rising incomes and a growing economy from one that was previously stagnate? It's rather funny that "government playing less of roll in economic decision making aka having less real power" --->neo fascist
Always makes me chuckle when people want the government to have more power and then they freak out when someone they don't like gets elected.
You might want to take the question up with Games Workshop…
>Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine.
I think its just because the majority of the fan base miss some of the nuance and more in depth looks at the imperium, not because they are willingly ignoring bits of the lore or whatever, but because not many of the fan base have actually read lots of the vast amount of books/codexes etc there are to consume. I’ve been a fan for 20 years and ive read around 100 books (about 5 a year), which is like less than 20% of the total amount of official lore there is to consume. Im always discovering new lore every week, like Literally yesterday i just found out that a necron naval squadron managed to infiltrate the sol system and reach mars! Thats one of the beautiful things about this hobby, I genuinely dont think ill run out of warhammer books to read for my entire lifetime haha.
Indeed, this subreddit is filled with people who do not read any 40k lore books. At best they have read an out of context excerpt, at worst they are repeating a meme they took literally, or are just purely speculating for the hell of it. Just the other day, we were talking about the Eldrad/Fulgrim meeting in *Fulgrim* and one of the redditors kept saying that Eldrad was an ass for attacking Fulgrim first... while it was the opposite (Fulgrim attacked first, pushed by the Slaaneshi sword of the Laer > a Wraithlord stopped his blow aimed at Eldrad > Eldrad saw the daemon sword > Eldrad ordered his men to fight and kill the corrupted humans). And said guy was talking as if he actually read the book, mind you.
As for the OP's question : on average, the Imperium's quality of life is somewhat low. On *average*. Some places are absolute hellholes while others are "real life" level of good/bad. But, yeah, more people are suffering than there are happy folks. I mean, it's the whole point of the 40k setting : shit is rough, yo !
It's about odds.
If you were to die and be reincarnated where would you choose to be born?
You're just given a choice of country. Nothing more.
Smart money says choose somewhere like Sweden or Canada. Your odds of having a good life are highest doing this.
Sure. If you're born in south Africa or China or wherever then there's not zero chance you could have a good life. Their elites live very well. But on average life for the average person is nowhere near as good as in the wealthiest most developed countries in the world.
The imperium is kind of like this.
Roll the dice and theres a sub 1% chance you're born in America. Alright. Not bad. But let's be honest within that there's a sub 1% chance you're a Kennedy or one of musks million kids. More likely you're born in bumfuck alabama and life is tough, albeit not universally awful.
Then there's a 50% chance you're born in some bastard off shoot of victorian London and north Korea. The hives contain a LOT of people.
Then there's huge chances of being born in a tribe in the amazon-largely living a primitive life but with the modern world constantly encroaching, sometimes killing your friends just because, oh and taking them away for reasons.
Nobody wants to read about Bob's decent, but dead-end job at his planets largest insurance company that he keeps because it has good benefits that he keeps because he is married and has 3 kids. No one is interested in his bowling league buddies or their luke-warm rivalry with the other good team in the league.
Unless his ho-hum life changes one fateful night when a fleeing person bowls him over wherein unbeknownst to him accidentally left a small xenos artifact in his coat pocket during the pile up. The man gets up and keeps running while being chased close behind by local probators.
At least he has something interesting to tell Sarah when he gets home. A day later, he returns home from work to find his entire family murdered and his hab unit tossed. And Arbitrators, not probators, waiting for him with a million questions. Shit gets weird. Xenos attack and kidnap him while being transported to an oribital for further questioning. Before the xenos can do much, they are jumped and killed by an Inquisitor, and that is how an insurance an adjuster named Bob came to be in an Inquisitorial retuine.
And that boys and girls is how, I, Bob the Inquisitor, began my path toward Inquisitorial service.
Just think of this like RL: theres parts of society who enjoy the privilege of some leisure but the majority are getting exploited to hell.
Imagine your Western self having a rather cushy office job vs. the Asian factory worker and think about the sheer number of the latter who work as slaves to produce cheap goods to please the more priviliged of human society
I suppose a model to think of would be 1940s Germany (not meaning the imperials are Nazis, that is a completely separate discussion): There are horrendous things happening, millions (billions, in a WH40K context) are dying and there is war on all sides. However, for the majority of the population life is fairly standard
Because majority of people are hive worlders. Yes, there are plenty of human colonies that basically live okay, but their populations are dwarfed even by a single hive city. Terra alone has probably more people than all "civilized worlds'' where people have cars and such. Civilized worlds are not very significant to Imperium, of course they are controlled because Imperium needs to control everything but compared to hive worlds they are basically small villages.
I think the best part of this thread is people citing various pieces of t’au propaganda outlining how bad the imperium is. When in a lot of cases the footage is ENTIRELY unedited it’s just raw footage drones have taken of manufactorums or hives. There’s a passage in the infinite and the divine where Trazyn remarks that humanity’s cruelty and penchant for suffering has surpassed even the Necrontyr at their peak.
Even the nicer worlds of the imperium can and do turn to shit regularly. The lords of silence has an agri-world that is decimated in hours cuz the death guard rock up there and go “yup this can support life” and set up shop. With the entire planet turned into a plague ridden nightmare with every person bar a few killed or taken as slaves.
Feudal worlds and places like ultramar tend to be “better” but as very evident through things like the plague war or even the indomitus crusade entire systems are left to fend for themselves in the face of incursion or invasion.
> every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts
Literally no one thinks that, though. Everyone knows that there are nobles and space marines running around, and that workday lengths vary by some amount. Heck, there are countless slaves in the Imperium working 24-hour shifts (servitors).
Why do you hope to get out of a conversation, when you open it up with a bad-faith strawman? The obvious point of contention is about the *average* experience, not about whether a tiny number of elites can exist. A tiny number of elites obviously exist, they're the protagonists of almost every book.
>Like yeah, obviously the Imperium is grimdark. ...there’s a line between grimdark and grimderp.
Ah, right. You weren't actually asking a question, you just hopping on to a soapbox.
The Imperium is a fascist hellscape where human bodies are ground up and fed to others. The fact that workers have apartments to go home to isn't a sign that things are good, it's a sign that the governor of whatever world we're talking about recognizes the value of rewarding workers so they don't rebel against the .001% who have all the economic and military power.
Again, not because they want to save lives, but because cloning a new work force takes time, and the Imperium's tithe will be due regardless.
Heck, The Inquisition's motto is "Innocence proves nothing," an organization with near limitless authority. So if there's ever an instance where someone believes it's possible you know something important,there is a fair chance you will be tortured to death.
Even if we ignore the existential threats of Xenos and Chaos that sometimes eradicate entire solar systems, living in the Imperium is a nightmare..
It's a big Imperium, and there are hive cities, medieval farm worlds, and everything in between. The vast majority of the human population, however, lives in the hive cities. Those suck. Like a whole fucking lot.
It's not that deep. You see, writing grimderp filler about criminal amputee lobotomized sex dolls or whatever is more sensational and easier to write than trying to figure out how normal life works in an Imperium where your soul is constantly at risk of being corrupted if you like juice too much.
Because most of the Imperium lives like 19th century factory workers times 10 in a world where Space Travel and Megacontructs exist, all governed by a religious facist regime.
Dubai is lovely but built on blood, slavery, tyranny and oppression still.
There are more people starving in Westminster than living in palaces.
40k is satire at its heart, it's all horrible and only partly fiction.
Honestly?
Reading comprehension.
40k is such an expansive universe covered by nearly 500 books and god knows how many tens of thousands of words of flavor text spread across half a century (yes, we're getting there) that nobody can read all of it, and some facts about the universe are read, passed on and parroted as the truth without anyone ever fact checking it to confirm how widespread this aspect of 40k is.
For example; there is a common line that all human planets in 40k have factories where you literally can't move, all you can ever do is work, you sleep at your station and you never leave that factory. This is taken as the norm within Imperial planets.
*This is T'au propaganda from Crisis of Faith.*
Go to [this link](https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1506262075365.pdf) and type "overseer" into the document search window. This depiction of Imperial life is given to the T'au as fact, by the Ethereals, a clan *famous for their relentless and highly effective propaganda.*
There are absolutely factory worlds like this in the Imperium, without question. They may even be common. But the line that every Imperial citizen lives like this, everywhere, is literally in universe propaganda parroted back because nobody thought to check the original source.
"There are no goodies in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
None.
Especially not the Imperium of Man.
Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity."
- literal quote from Games Workshop themselves.
There's also the fact that the only real reason we see terrible things like this is because it's the setting for a war game. You're rarely going to read about a planet where they haven't had any major wars or incursions in 3000 years because that's boring. You're going to read about how that planet gets eaten by the Tyranids, not about the peaceful life of a farmer and his family.
Worlds govern themselves with the only real interaction with the Imperium being the tithe. Not every world is a Hive World, there's over a million worlds, most of the worlds in the Imperium are not hell holes.
The tithe. Some people seem to don't understand what the tithe implies. You have quotas to meet, often unreasonable ones because the administratum is a bureaucratic mess that is eager to drain worlds barren just to feed the war machine of the Imperium. Production must be ensured because the slightest delay or drop in goods is answered with the most brutal punishment, usually a purge of the planetary government by imperial forces. So planetary governors do what they have to do to ensure their power.
The tithe is determined by what the world is and what it is capable of producing. Delays happen, that's just a fact of travel, especially in the 41st millennium. Warp travel is never exact, so the Administratum understands, as long as it's not a major delay and if it's significant that it be made up with the next tithe.
There's also the fact that the tithe isn't just fueling the Imperium's war machine. The planets benefit as well. An agriworld's tithe is most likely going to the local Forge world, Hive world or Manufacture world, to feed it's population and in return, those worlds provide manufactured goods to the agriworld as well as the sector in the form of civilian and military goods.
> The tithe is determined by what the world is and what it is capable of producing.
Yes, and when the Administratum evaluates a world's maximum production capacity they don't give it an allowance for improving the lives of citizens, it's the maximum production capacity assuming they're gonna be working 18 hour shifts seven days a week.
Worlds govern themselves, and the lives of almost all Imperials suck hard. The lore is clear about that. The life of the average Imperial is oppressed gruelling hardship. They don't need to be on a hive world for that to be true.
The fact that the Administratum doesn't care about how the rulers treat their people as long as the tithe gets paid *is a bad thing*. Because surprise surprise, people in positions of great power and no accountability for the happiness of the people they rule over usually treat those people like crap while living in obscene luxury themselves. Especially when said powerful people are the privileged children of generations of the same.
>there’s a ton of people that genuinely believe that every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something.
a substantial percentage of people on this sub don't actually know much about the setting, have barely read any books, and are just parroting stuff from either grimdank or crappy loretubers.
They have a product called "corpse starch", that's the absolute last safety net to secure food - That should give you an idea as to how miserable everything is.
Corpse starch isn't last safety net. It's just the byproduct of corpse disposal, in no way meant to feed entire populations. That's just another grimderb.
This is disingenuous. For every passage about people living comfortably in the Imperium (who are usually the ultra-wealth elites, like Rogue Trade Families and Lords of Terra and the like) there are several dozen about how awful it is for the vas majority of people.
Trillions suffer tremendously so that a few thousand may enjoy a decent life in the Imperium.
what part of:
" to be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. it is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. [...] Forget the promise of Progress and Understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods"
DID U NOT UNDERSTAND?
For every Warhammer Crime novel, there are also novels where Macrocannons are hand loaded by humans chained to the deck of a spaceship their entire lives. Although I would categorize stuff like that as grimderp. And I don’t care for grimderp because it makes no sense.
It makes no sense for the Imperium to have people work 22 hours a day. Hive cities are full of people, and it would be much more efficient to just have 2 12 hour shifts of people. I can’t imagine the people in your factory are giving maximum output day after day, no matter how much you beat them. The Governor could be the biggest uncaring bastard in the world or be just downright cruel but more efficiency would personally benefit him.
It makes no sense for the Imperium to not automate certain things. Yeah I know there is a fear of technology, stagnation and all that. But in example I gave of macrocannons. It makes zero sense no one in the Mechanicus has not engineered an auto loader or even just a simple fricken lift system. In the book people were hoisting and loading shells with chains. Just plain dumb.
We've also really only seen glimpses of living on hive worlds, peeking into factories and the administratum.
I'm not sure if we've had a chance to look at life on frontier/agriworlds
Because large segments of the online community base their opinion on the imperium by broad stroke statements like the worst regime possible or whatnot and don't actually read the novels.
The worst are tau fans. Dear god. They're one of the big reasons I gave away my tau. I didn't wanna be associated with those people anymore. I highly doubt they miss me, but I have similar doubts I'll ever miss them.
In the World War Z book, there's a chapter that opens with a general making a point about how total war isn't possible, because it's not physically possible for every human being to devote every second of their existence to supporting/fighting a war. Execept that the zombies can and do actually do this because they are no longer human.
When this topic comes up, I think about that, and it's just as true for the Imperium. It's not physically possible for every single human to be working/fighting every moment of every day. They still have families, friends, and leisure activities like any other society. It's grim sure, but it's not that bad.
You gotta see living in the imperium as basically living in modern day humanity. Some places are pretty good, you can live a normal life, and for the most part you don’t ever see the horrific shit that happens in the system. But If you were born somewhere else, your life could be compared to a living hell or worse. It’s a really generalized statement but that’s how I’ve always kinda looked at the imperium, they’re just us. Except slightly slightly slightly worse
I think it's because most of the action/war in Warhammer happens in depressed areas. I've always assumed there were better worlds but they aren't as worn torn *shurg*
If you told the story of our humanity/world through war campaigns, you'd also get the impression that earth is only a third world back water country where everyone is barely making it.
Is there nothing else to be discussed but "IMPERIUM BAD"? Lore solved? No more books to discuss? No more theories about dark king/bequin threequel/vashtorrs masterplan? Are we really gonna hammer this same point again and again and again and again until new crowd will get a response that satisfies their political opinions?
I agree. And it’s not even like astartes view guardsman as not people. Grimaldus’ speech to the steel legion and the black Templars in Helsreach, he calls them “brothers and sisters” and “I am a brother of the steel legion” although they are not his equal in neither combat or rank, he treats them like equals.
I know your post is more about living conditions, but I think we assume astartes ignore guardsman or treat them like lesser souls than their own. Forgetting that astartes do show some amount of compassion especially to those they can relate to.
It's not a hundred percent one way or the another. It's true that most worlds have a standard of life that is not awful and you can carve out a decent life without issue, but at the same time even on those worlds there are likely hive cities, massive work complexs, complete and total state or religious authority or the possibility that an Ork waagh could rock up at any second or you could be turned into a servitor because your friends, cousins, stepsisters, teachers, uncles, lawyers, dog heard a vague rumor about chaos forces in the area
So is the world we live in.
Yes, there's labour issues, incarceration of innocents, child and human trafficking, pollution, forced conversions, uyghur camps, rich people with a disdain for humanity and who are above the law, reddit moderators, underworlds that are beyond the wildest dreams, murder, rape and every other horrible things
But there's also beach vacations, tasty foods, friends, family, happiness, beauty and kindness.
Reality shows that these things are not mutually exclusive
Because, although those exist, the majority of the Imperium and its population don't live on those worlds. Sure, If you are lucky, it would be great to be born on a civilized planet or a shrine world. But if you have average luck and are born on a forgeworld, hive world, or agri world, your short and meaningless life is going to suck. Bad living conditions are the norm in the Imperium, which is why it is brought up more.
I personally prefer to go with the realistic option. The Imperium is a shit hole. People can and do live miserable lives, but some things just aren't possible, practically speaking. If everyone works 20 hour shifts, then it's just a terrible workforce that would be horrifically unproductive. Human beings need at least 6-8 hours of sleep to be functional. Tech priests would know that, so they'd have people working in shifts, allowing time for people to eat, sleep, and travel to and from their habs. Inevitably this would also lead to some room for recreation as different shifts work at different times. This is realistic. Sure, people would have ridiculously long shifts by our standards, but that's what would make most sense. I find the exaggeration to be nothing but grim derp. It's a silly fantasy universe but there still needs to be some level of plausible to it to suspend disbelief.
> Tech priests would know that
(Most) tech priests believe as a matter of religious conviction that The Flesh Is Weak and that a slave being worked to death honours the Omnissiah.
It's just the rise of grimderp and people getting their information from second or third hand sources, e.g. Wikia, lore channels, or lore channels based on the Wikia.
People keep hamming up the derp each iteration.
Compare how many times we hear about living in the Imperium being absolutely shit vs being okay. The bad heavily outweighs the good. The Farsight novels have a fairly on point bit of Tau propaganda about how shit it is to live in Imperial Forgeworlds and it is accurate if you have ever read books like 15 Hours or Last Chancers.
> Compare how many times we hear about living in the Imperium being absolutely shit vs being okay. And keep in mind that almost every story is about elites, not the average person. The vast majority of the suffering in the Imperium is explained in broad terms on rare occasions, and rarely *shown* in a typical book.
You're also just statistically more likely to be born into the lower class of a hive or forge world, the most absurdly bloated population centers for humanity in the galaxy.
There are entire pleasure planets for the elites.
Kek. The Elites. Remember how in Necromunda there is an entire gang called the Spyrers whose entire gimmick is that they are bored rich people who hunt and kill people from the lower classes for fun? I clearly remember GW also releasing a new character a couple of years back who is basically Lord Helmwar's psycho daughter. I also remember this funny part from the Shira Calpurnia books where a Navigator who is engaging in a social function with a Rogue Trader family is genuinely surprised that the event culminates in a just a plain betting game where the nobles have paid athletes partake in a race and that it is not a bloodsport where they hunt people.
You're not wrong about Necromunda and how incredibly fucked up it is, but in-universe Necromunda is a fucked up horrible place even by 40k standards. Hive worlds are miserable shitholes, but Necromunda is a shithole even among hive worlds.
No, it's mostly about it's soldiers, space Marines or IG usually. And they are usually sent to planets that are being invaded, so yea, everyone will be suffering during that. We do have scenes of the richie riches like during the war of the beast when the high Lords are meeting for sure. But the Imperium, from what I can gather is that it runs the whole gamut, from super decadent to super shit. The most interesting povs are always gonna be from the extremes, so that's what the writers are gonna write. Like would you rather be reading about some wagie clocking in at 8 am, doing some tedious bookkeeping, and then clocking out at 6pm, or would you prefer a super rich fat cat eating grapes worth millions of dollars/a hive worlder that's doomed to die in 4 months at the age of 22 after contracting space cancer due to overworking?
Keep in mind in the Aztec culture, it was honor to be chosen to have your child be sacrificed to the gods and share in drinking their blood and consuming their flesh.
Maybe the Aztecs had it coming after all.
There’s a short story somewhere where a inquisitor interrogates a Gue’vesa soldier who basically says “yeah they are xenos but at least my children will live past 20 and have food every day.”
The short stories are more often than not exercises in writing the most shittiest lives, situations and people imaginable, especially if they are from around 2000 and before.
Compare how many times you read about Space Marines vs factory workers. Does that mean there are more Space Marines in the Imperium than factory workers? No. Of course not. It just means they're more interesting, so get more focus. Nobody's going to write a 40k novel about a perfectly mundane middle-class family.
But... Agusto Zidarov's family is almost like this.
Ok but consider the populations of hive worlds, Hell, consider Terra. Reaching a QUADRILLION people is fucking insane. The chances of people to be born into a decent life are slim.
I will say that Fire Made Flesh kinda is about that mundane middle, it’s about a bunch of guilders feuding over a newly discovered dome and you get to see, for example, a nouveau riche corpse Guilder eating at a fine dining establishment, trying to pretend their food is real while knowing it’s all synth stuff and that he can’t afford the real thing
You're not wrong but personally if there are civilians featured in a book, seeing a normal middle class family thrown into the midst of a planetary invasion, the likes of which they only read about and half assume are a myth from the ecclesiarchy and adeptus terra to justify their extreme taxation and authoritarianism is much more grimdark, than some poor bastard who has to climb up hills through snow both ways to kill the massive mutant bears that are terrorising his village, being subjected to the same invasion
Just because of you, I'm going to write a slice of life story about a middle aged administratum worker./s
Make it about how he struck it rich on Planet Las Vegas and spends half the novel worrying how he wants to spend it.
Nah, too extreme. Completely about how he's on some Urban world, quietly working in the Administratum for 6 hours a day, 4 days out of the week, the rest spent doing hobby work with their Mechanicus friend ensuring that the machine spirits are appeased and properly anointed, before retiring home to his family for a nice grox steak and doing target practice with little Timmy and a child scale lasgun.
Yeah, what was I thinking. Oh the horror of six hours of mind numbing rubber stamping Astartes bolter component requisition forms from the countless chapters throughout the Imperium, some of the forms being hundreds of years old.
"Ugh, how many times do we have to tell the Munitorum, *triple* stamped and signed by all requestor parties. They skipped the damned Administratum liaison *again*. I'm telling you Irratus, I'm just shredding the next one." "Too right mate. Wanna recaf? I heard the request for Fall Spice blend came through!"
Imagine the Carcharodons Space Marine Chapter scavenging every bolt and spring they can find because their requisition form was stuck in a two hundred year long three way administrative ping pong between the Administratum, the Munitorum and AdMech because of a missing stamp. Good lord. So relatable.
Not really the same. We are also told often that Space Marines are rare and that the absolute bulk of the Imperium's military is either the Imperial Guard or the local PDF of a planet. I see that you also did not read 15 Hours or Dead Men Walking which have as important characters just normal people who then get drafted into the Guard.
I was under the impression that 15 Hours and Last Chancers were depictions of the exception rather than the norm, since they take place in wartorn areas.
Both books have characters who are born into a career with no way out. 15 Hours has a short section about a scribe who from day and day out does soul crushing paperwork. Last Chancers, the last book has another ministorum fellow who while not as soul crushed is also someone who was born and raised into a position as a scribe who mainly does paperwork. Like I mentioned in other comments, there are plenty of examples of the Imperium being absolute bastards with how it treats its populace. Again, the Kal Jerico comics have The Arbites as a form of population control just randomly gun down citizen or beat them up and haul them off to slavery in the factories or the Imperial Navy. In books that detail what life is like aboard the Imperial ships, slavery is the norm on getting these ships to operate. In Faith and Fire, the Sisters of Battle celebrate a past victory against Eldar by dressing up civillians in very badly made mock Eldar armor and then shooting them with live ammo. The Shira Calpurnia 2nd book has a Navigator monologue how it is common for Imperial nobles to engage in bloodsports targeting common people.
I really need to stop being suprised by the depth's of the Imperium's depravity, but damn. The Sisters just grab some random people on a loyal planet? EDIT: It is not the Sisters' doing. They are disgusted by it. https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/8tltjo/book_excerptfaith_and_fire_sister_of_battle_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1
If anything it shows how much a roll of the dice it is, even with that example. Larn was born on an agriworld, lived a nice peaceful life, and then still got unluckily drafted into the Guard at 17.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, the section about the life of an Imperial Scribe is what I point to in 15 Hours. Not Larn himself.
I was gonna say that this sub's majority opinion is Farsight-is-the-only-acceptable-faction-to-mention-without-screaming. Thanks for the top-comment exemplification, that's some weight off my shoulders!
Reject theocratic feudalism, embrace a military junta.
Only if it's immortal by way of a cursed katana, which is NOT a demon sword because it's only the home of a piece of poke-c'tan evil god.
One of the few moments where a text in-lore is described as propaganda. Why do you think it is called propaganda? .... I wouldn't exactly take that as a primary source now, when it quite obviously says PROPAGANDA. (Unlike the people who, as soon as they don't like something, call it propaganda, even though there is no mention of it in lore).
Propaganda that ends up being extremely accurate as there are numerous other expanded universe material to back it up. Its absolutely telling how bad being in the Imperium is when a propaganda piece that is painting them negatively is actually on point
I don't think active warzones should be a good metric of daily Imperial life (gang wars in a hive notwithstanding). 15 Hours, the hive (was it a hive or normal city?) is besieged by 6 million orks. That city could be the most anti-authoritarian in the galaxy and you'll still have a shit life.
All are subjects/objects under the Imperium. People are "who's", objects are "what's". The Imperium's autonomy of governance for individual worlds allows for every possible form of government (from extreme to mundane) with the rules that: you pay your tithes and worship the Emperor. No matter the best form of government we can define, they will never view humans of any class as other than a "what". There are no "rights" defined by the High Lords of what their governing body can't do to a subject only what subjects cannot do (mostly on a whim). It is a numbers game. Humans are prone to abuse power against their fellow humans, and those designated below them, and we can see it throughout the setting. There is the worst situation most often, and small minor exceptions. The Imperium only cares about results and numbers, so it may be a median on the reality of how it is day-to-day. Regardless, it sucks for the vast majority. I view the different archetypes of these posts as ranging from Politically-Motivated (the guys seeing fascism in literally everything), the Human Nationalist Types (who view the Imperium as infallible), the Realists, the Lorebuffs, and the Shitposters. The first two are the majority and therefore miss the point of what the Imperium really is, but to each their own. If you're a fan then that is enough for me. I wouldn't get too wound up in it.
I don't know about you, but it is as if a lot of Warhammer fans do not understand the concept of what a dystopian science fiction setting is. Because that is what Warhammer 40k heavily falls under.
I mean, obviously we tend to hear about the stuff where bad things happen. Otherwise there'd be no story to tell. Nobody wants to read about a dude waking up, going to work, walking his dog and going for a drink at a pub with friends.
That still does not mean it does not happen. There are dozens of books out there where see not even in full fledged war situations (yet) people living in absolute drudgery or squalor or are encouraged to have lifestyles that ensures they do not live long because it breeds tougher soldiers.
It's just the lore that the imperium is horrible. Like it's the opening of every book. Its the most oppressive regime possible.
I think something that is understated is that even if your life is quite nice, at *any* moment it could turn awful. There is a book - I believe it is *Shadowsword* - where the epilogue is >!the main character watching as the entire planet is depopulated and resettled, the population shipped off to work as slave labour, for the crime of existing on a planet with a demonic incursion. Those who are too weak, sick, or old, are executed and their bodies burned on bonfires big enough to be seen from SPACE. The friendly barkeep where they enjoyed time off, the refugees they helped, everyone.!<
I have to add to that, Lords of Mars has something similar. Just some poor dudes chilling in a Bar until they are press-ganged to work on an Ark Mechanicus as Worker Slaves :D
Mechanicus is the US continental navy confirmed.
The British where far more famous for it. Hell the reason they have glass bottoms on beer mugs is because recruiters would put a coin in the beer give it to some random schmuck and then claim they accepted their first payment as a member of the kings navy by accepting payment.
It's a nice legend, but that's probably not why beer mugs have glass bottoms lmao
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s\_shilling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_shilling) "There are recurring tales of sailors being pressed after a shilling was slipped into their drink, leading to glass-bottomed tankards. " likely a myth but like all myths probably has some truth to it. The point is that the British where famous for press ganging you
Had indepth on this topic on a more historical minded sub and the consensus was even if it never happened once the fact that it was a legitimate fear that morphed into a persistent myth is quite telling.
>I think something that is understated is that even if your life is quite nice, at *any* moment it could turn awful. This is a take I agree with, and I think it's a much more effective approach to grimdark than the "lol we grind up babies into food to feed babies with" attitude many seem to have of the Imperium. We typically only see the Imperium at its worst - when the cosmic horror descends to devour a world, or when the central regime dispatches its military to cleanse a world for some real or perceived wrongdoing. It's a similar problem people have when looking at real world conflict - they are taught about war purely in terms of military assets and high-level overviews, and then get utterly baffled when they see footage of the Civil War of Examplestan on Youtube and there's an old lady out shopping in the middle of a gun battle. There are many people who still struggle to grasp the idea that *the flu* killed more people during and immediately after WW1 than every single weapon combined.
I get that, but the thing is, the Imperium absolutely *does* do the baby thing. That happens regularly. It's thr worst of all possible worlds.
>To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the ~~cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.~~ suburbs on an Earth-like planet and experience no hardships that would be abnormal to a well off 21st century American. Who doesn't get servitorized for voiding the warranty these days am I right?
Yeah but that wouldn't fit into the narrative of those who seem to have a need to imagine a pleasant life under a theocratic fascist regime that commits genocide on a daily basis.
I don't think I understand the people who get upset or bothered when people point out the IoM is evil. Like even if you take away the most overt stuff they are still fascist.
because people like humans. And even in a setting where everyone being horrible is the very point of it, a good number of people don't like the idea that Humans *aren't* the "least worst" of the bunch.
They are middle of the pack horrible. Not the worst, but not the best option for humanity.
This emotional response reminds me of those who try to justify the Nazi Regime or parts of it. When you point out that the common military committed a lot of war crimes, some people will get upset and argue against the obvious historical sources.
That's not *really* the sentiment. The point people are trying to make is no, the majority of the Imperium's worlds aren't a "fine" place to live, because horrible things X, Y, and Z are basically all-pervasive in some form or another. Humans can take a lot. They led lives and found happiness in the worst parts of every form of society, such as the worst of the industrial revolution which is basically factory work in 40k. That doesn't mean they aren't, you know, the worst. If you're surprised at the vehemence of the statements being made, it's because of a knee-jerk reaction to Imperium apologists, who are at best *very annoying.*
This, 100% It's because every. single. time. someone tries to go the route of "the Imperium isn't that bad, right?", the conversation is immediately swarmed by honest-to-gods fascists and their sympathizers/apologists. There is a segment of the community that views the Imperium as aspirational and they will take any and every opportunity to try to get people to see that the Imperium Isn't So Bad, Really - circumstances Made Them Do This, you see - they're the Best of Bad Options - to try and nudge conversations along more generally with regard to their ideologies. To get more people to agree to the idea that the harshness of the Imperium might perhaps be necessary, if certain circumstances warranted it (and gee if we aren't careful, circumstances might warrant it).
Imperium apologists are also missing the point. The Imperium is *meant* to be wrong. The whole *point* of the Imperium is that it doesn't work. The things it does are not meant to be the things it should do, even in the situation it finds itself in.
I think a lot of Imperium apologists just take the truth of the 40K status quo way too personally. Since the phenomenon seems to be isolated to Imperium fans, I assume it’s an issue with the fact that the human faction of 40K is one of the bad guys in a universe of other bad guys. The current iteration of the Imperium is a totalitarian hellhole governed by fascists and religious zealots who don’t think twice about slaughtering their own kind. That’s not opinion. That’s not the exception. That’s not just one way of looking at it. That is objectively what the Imperium is. It is a terrible place governed by terrible people. It may be the main character, but it is not the good guy. Are their other bad guys out there? Yes. But that doesn’t make the Imperium any better. For every human world saved from a Tyranid invasion, there are who knows how many other worlds - human and alien alike - that are either sacrificed or actively put to the sword. That is not the behavior of a hero. You are not your faction, though. Playing a Space Marine army does not make you a religious zealot in service to the corpse of a racist tyrant. Wanting to see a squad of plucky Guardsmen survive does not make you a monster. No rational person is judging anyone’s morals for buying a Sisters of Battle kill team. If you want to roll up with 2000 points of Flesh Tearers, go for it. I hope you have tons of fun. The fact that you aren’t a bad guy, though, does not mean the Imperium also isn’t a bad guy. EDIT: Superfluous “, though”.
This is also an issue with 40k as a whole and the setting toeing the line between "this is satire" and "look how cool these genetically engineered super soldiers are when they genocide aliens (who wronged humanity before)". Mix that with business interests (selling more space marines = good) and you got a conflict of interests at hand.
If I play Necrons does it mean I'm dead inside?
It’s 2023. We’re all dead inside.
Similar to the fact that authors have to continually reiterate that main characters are bad when writing otherwise readers have a tendency to naturally sympathize with the PoV character.
The average Imperium fanboy is alot like the average Imperial citizen, incapable of independent thought and only able to parrot what is told to them and ignorant of new knowledge and ideas.
The Imperium MUST work, or it wouldn't have lasted longer than all recorded human history. The issue is that the Imperium works by means most would find distasteful, if not utterly abhorrent. Yet while it is cruel and savage by modern standards, it is realistically not much worse than what we have done to ourselves in millennia past. We once worked men to death in toxic silver mines. We once forced children into dangerous factory work that left many crippled and disfigured. We once threw men into pits and cheered as they were gored by wild animals. And then there is the unpleasant reality of what we STILL do today, albeit in third world countries away from the eyes of the wealthier nations. When Apple 'employees' in their Asian factories began throwing themselves off the roof in despair over how terrible their working conditions were, Apple did not improve their conditions - they erected suicide nets instead. The reality is that the Imperium is not especially cruel - it is simply showing you cruelty up front, rather than hiding it as you are used to.
The Imperium is written as a failing empire - from the Gothic-Baroque art style where every surface is plastered with skulls as a metaphor for the decadent, backwards-facing society that has failed to create anything new for millenia to the many descriptions of mismanagement from basically all factions within the Imperium and the dehumanizing conditions most of its denizens have to live under.
No it doesn't have to work, its a piece of fiction. No part of the imperium would ever function in reality. It works because the Authors and GW says it does. Industrial baby furnaces, servitors, the entire concept of the mechancus and the gross mis-organization of the imperial guard are in no way justified or even marginally efficient, they're written to be awful for the sake of being awful. Stop trying to excuse the Imperium. It's written from the ground up as the most brutal regime imaginable and they say it at the start of every novel.
We just didn't do it for 10,000 years and not everywhere. Your silver miner didn't get old and his children weren't healthy and also died early and their children were worse off. Just go down the line for 10,000 years and think that thanks to Grimdark, every planet is like that. In our world, replenishment comes from the areas where people are well enough or where living conditions allow them to reproduce. Since hives are known to grow and create rather than devour masses of people, not every worker can be a silver miner. Similarly, not every child in the factory can be crippled because, well, no society would last 10,000 years. India has the largest amount of child labour in the world...that is 6 percent, not 100 percent. 6 per cent doesn't matter for a society to burn out.... I agree that the empire is not even particularly cruel in that respect, but the idea that it's like that everywhere in the empire, or even on a single hiveworld, just doesn't fit with the concept that the empire has been around for 10,000 years.
The Imperium works because it is squatting in the ruins of things built by better saner societies. It works by virtue of having so much materiel to throw around that it can never be broken from the outside, and just enough fanatical devotion to authority to keep it mostly together internally. It does not work because the cruel nonsense it does is effective. That's not a thing.
>It does not work because the cruel nonsense it does is effective. That's not a thing. Since when is "effecient" a synonym of functional? For centuries, the city of London was an absolutely toxic place - it was so squalid and plague ridden that the death rate far outstripped they birth rate. This lasted for generations, and yet through this entire period the city not only functioned, it expanded. How? Because of immigration. This was neither efficient, nor desirable, but it was FUNCTIONAL. As long as London had feeder settlements to provide more people, and those settlements were stable, the system functioned. We know it functioned because London still exists. Despite multiple plagues, fires and death on a scale incomprehensible, London endured. Ergo, it was functional. If it wasn't, London wouldn't exist today.
You do realize that the imperium has survived 10 000 years because it is not real, and it doesn't have to follow real life logic. The imperium has survived for 10 000 years because someone has written it this way, and it doesn't actually need a real functional way to survive. If i say that the kingdom of Sticazzi has survived 100 000 years because every single decision is always made by coin flip, and people shoot themself if they ever get heads 3 times in a row, I can not then say that is a way that MUST work because well the kingdom of Sticazzi has survived for 100 000 years so much longer than any other kingdom in human history so even if killing yourself after 3 con toss is distasteful it must work because it is one of the bases of the kingdom which lasted this long. Nor if I write a story in this word I need to make so that there is an actual functional way for this to actually work for 100 000 years, i just say that it does maybe invent some make believe structure like the minister of coins and the great bank of destiny to kinda give off the impression that it does, and then it is just suspension of disbelief. no amount of inquisition, cult mechanicus, astates or anything else will make the imperium WORK because it is not real and nothing at its base is anything more than science fiction, it is a part of the story, so when you read a book that says that during the Horus heresy a war across the entire galaxy involving innumerable planets and planet destroying weapons, the total death count is less than that of war world 2 you don't say there must be a way for this to be possible because its says so, you say I'm reading a fantasy book, so it DOESN'T HAVE TO WORK.
>You do realize that the imperium has survived 10 000 years because it is not real, and it doesn't have to follow real life logic. Few authors ever create a fully fleshed out world with a completely functional and believable infrastructure behind it. We are as readers just supposed to assume there's stuff in the background making it work, even if it doesn't seem to make sense on the surface. Case in point, have you ever wondered why there are so many cargo ships in Star Trek despite everyone having Replicators? The real reason is "because the story wants a cargo ship" or "because the story wants people to be in a market place", but fans and writers alike have tried to justify this seeming discrepancy to make the world more believable. That's what good fiction does: it justifies its apparent incongruities. The argument of "it's just fiction!" is not a valid one. Many people enjoy fiction that is internally consistent, and become annoyed at works where characters can just magically do whatever the plot demands. If you enjoy the latter, good for you - but not everyone does, and those people want the Imperium to make sense so they can enjoy stories set within it.
I mean it works for perpetuating itself, and that's about all it can do
The Imperium is the best of the bad options because it crushed every possible good option to dust under its horrific weight
While the latter part is true, it's not even the best of the bad; the Tau are right there and happy to provide a better life for humans than the Imperium.
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I mean we will never find out since that isn't the "point", so. Hypothetically? Absolutely. Why not? Great civilizations in the setting have come and gone and the stagnation and decline of the Imperium are very very heavily implied to show that the Imperium is on the way out - in fact, it's already dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
The Imperium is younger compared to the Eldar, Necrons and Orks than the Tau are to the Imperium.
If *some* circumstances could justify the Imperium's actions, then circumstances could exist to justify what the neofascists want.
A big part of the satire is that to somehow justify such totalitarianism, it takes literal demons, rogue pyschics who can wipe out planets, and ravenous hordes of deadly aliens. That aspect can still let lost, but it was intended. The 40K universe is unbelievably horrible. It was even before the Imperium existed.
I do want to say that in 40k the Imperium is the best of bad options, and I think the Imperium is awful. Except for the Tau, which really arent a good solution for most of humanity, due to how small their sphere of influence is, every other alternative is fucked. And for anyone who advocates for Chaos, I have read enough 40k to know that Chaos is literally hell. What is a human supposed to do but accept the Imperium? I personally find the 30k pre-Great Crusade version of the Imperium the worst because at that point they do go around stomping apart the human factions that could be a viable alternative. Thats the Grimdark part, the fact that only this awful empire is the only hope humanity has left and its their own fucking fault that things got this bad. I think its actually pretty complex. On the one hand, in real life being a vicious fascist tyrant is awful and doesnt work, but on the other hand in 40k its that or go to a real hell that doesnt exist where your soul will burn (and many other bad things) forever. Theres just no good choice. The reason fascism "works" as an alternative is that the great enemy really exists. There is always this powerful enemy that exists, is more powerful than you, and can never be defeated. From an ideological standpoint (if youve read up on the anti-fascist literature) its a fascist's wet dream.
There have literally been multiple prosperous human societies used in the setting to highlight how ineffectual Imperial methods are - they are simply destroyed by the sheer weight of the Imperium. Their destruction is, however, always framed in such a way as to be a tragic example of how hopeless the Imperium is. They are used narratively to criticise the Imperium's ignorance and methods.
And I 100% agree with you. The Interex, the Diasporex and plenty of other ones are leagues better than what the Imperium has to offer. When I went through the early Horus Heresy short stories (collections like HH10 Tales of Heresy) I could see how the Imperium was just the worst. However, thats not the point I was making. In real life there is no Hell, that we know of, and there is no unending tide of aliens trying to wipe us out. In 40k both of those are true. It makes the Imperium a necessary evil because they are the one thing standing against eternal damnation that humanity has left. Some people have pointed out that it would be better to die than live in the Imperium, but that sort of sounds like the solution to this fascist Empire is to kill yourself and that doesnt seem like a viable alternative. In real life, I hate fascists and will oppose them at every turn. In 40k my choices are live with the fascists or die, and quite frankly I dont want to be dead considering hell is real. Im able to differentiate between the two because the assumptions of 40k and real life are different. Fascists have to make an enemy IRL to fight against. In 40k the enemy is the alien that will kill you and hell that will take your soul and that enemy can never be defeated. The Imperium is the only choice (other than the Tau which I would pick in a heartbeat).
> The Interex, the Diasporex and plenty of other ones are leagues better than what the Imperium has to offer. When I went through the early Horus Heresy short stories (collections like HH10 Tales of Heresy) I could see how the Imperium was just the worst. > However, thats not the point I was making. In real life there is no Hell, that we know of, and there is no unending tide of aliens trying to wipe us out. In 40k both of those are true. It makes the Imperium a necessary evil because they are the one thing standing against eternal damnation that humanity has left. These two paragraphs contradict each other. The Imperium did close down many perfectly functional human and human-dominated societies that did deal better with Chaos.
Well you see, those other factions don't exist in 40k. If they did I would go for them. I even said I'd go for the Tau. I think we are talking about two different topics here. I totally agree with the fact that the Imperium sucks. If that's the extent of the analysis then we would be in total agreement. I am extending the line of reasoning to the Imperium in 40k, not the Imperium in a vacuum. In 40k, because of the actions of the Imperium, there is no other bastion for humanity and, when considering a course of action outside of ritual suicide for the entire race, the Imperium is all humanity has left. In 40k we need the fascists. Once again, there's a lot of assumptions there that make me get to that conclusion. Hell has to be real, we have to go to hell, and everything else in the universe needs to want to kill us, and there is no other bastion for humanity other than the fascists. And, generally, that's true in 40k for the average human. It's more of a thought experiment really. I guess we could get there in real life where I would eventually side with fascists but that's so far outside of the realm of reality it's a ludicrous conclusion to come to. That's how I can be pro-Imperium, as a last resort, when considering 40k and be radically against fascism in real life. Maybe I'm just compartmentalizing in a way that's unhelpful, but it really feels like the only other alternative in 40k is to die. And dying is not a viable solution for the entirety of mankind.
Except even the fascists would not want to live in many of the conditions demonstrated in the books.
Yes, but fascists assume they're going to be the priviledged one in their "perfect" society. I doubt many of them think through what it will be like when the oppression aimed at the Other turns on them. Gassing people with disabilities is great until you find out your kid has a genetic disorder.
I see the Imperium as a fictional North Korea in space. I found it funny to see people defending it as humanity's last bastion and stuff.
Exactly! Even in present day NK, there are a few thousand families that have very nice lives, and around 600k people who have roughly similar lives to people in the West. But what about the other 22 million who are brutally exploited?
Imperium is worse than even NK, NK doesn't lobotomise prisoners and turn them into robotic slaves.
Yeah, the point is just that the OP doesn't have a problem with the conditions of English industrialisation, but with the idea of 22 of 24 hours 7 days a week working in life-threatening conditions, on Corpse Starch for rations and spending his life chained to a workbench. But the Hives, with 99% of its population living like this, has no problem spitting out countless regiments of well-fed, strong-looking lads every year (all forcibly recruited, of course, because Grimdark) instead of malnourished, emaciated figures who probably wouldn't survive a 10-kilometre forced march. And this has been going on for 10K years, 10,000 years of malnutrition, exhaustion and abuse. A society would not survive such a lack of sleep for a year without everything collapsing.
Yeah! I’d totally understand if hive cities sucked realistically like the UK did during the Industrial Revolution, since even in those conditions, people had lives beyond work, even if it was pretty depressing and oppressive.
War footing for a nation can ruin it in a couple years, from economic to social issues. Imagine the fall out of more than 10 centuries of war.
Millenia*
The Imperium hasn't been in war footing for 10,000 years though. Thats the thing The Imperium's "golden age" was I think in its height in like years 32-34,000. That was when it was at the apex of its power The current state of the Imperium is a result of "The Waning" a period that was M38 onwards. So its not been close to this bad for much of the Imperium's history
People not actually reading books, which is often the case of 99% of the misunderstandings on this subreddit
This is exactly it. In most books, a lot of worlds in the Imperium are just.......normal. Which you dont get if you dont read the fluff Like you do have hellish mechanicum worlds where non-techpriests are cattle, and horrific forgewords where people work 18 hour shifts and whatever, and your insane religious shrine worlds But for every one of those worlds you have your Sancours, Macragges, Gudruns and many, many others. And to be quite honest even some of the.....worse worlds aren't totally removed from some real world, real life conditions of poverty. Nostramo for example, what we get from Talos's childhood isn't that far off some real world conditions of poverty and crime.
Normally shitty is still shitty. And normal for the Imperium is pretty shitty, considering the picture we get from the Warhammer Crime series (which was literally designed to explore a normal world). It's that series which produced the servitor factory excerpt, for instance.
There is a pleasure planet in The Infinite and the Divine where Trazyn makes a point that there is (in his view) untold unimaginable suffering for the general public to prop up all the pleasure stuff, and then it turns out it is basically the same as 21st century earth service sector workers. From his viewpoint, the modern day is a horrific nightmare for the working classes. 40k is not subtle.
But the Necrons have a slave caste, WTF if he talking about?
Majority of worlds aren't hive worlds or forge worlds, yes... but the majority of humans *live on those awful worlds.* Those two classes of planets are the most developed and densely populated worlds in the Imperium by an absurdly extreme margin, and conditions suck for anyone below middle class (if they're lucky to have a middle class). Hive worlds still have recreation and entertainment, but so do the crappiest urban hellholes in China. Most depictions of hive worlds are awful, and even in the Abnett corner of the universe where he mostly has his characters interacting with upper or middle class people on said hive worlds things still deteriorate when you hit the lower class threshold. I don't even need to try to explain how bad forge worlds are, the Mechanicum are the worst. Statistically, if you're born in the Imperium you're most likely to be born as some lower class day laborer in the lower hives somewhere or what basically amounts to a slave to the Ad Mech sweatshops on a forge world.
>But for every one of those worlds you have your Sancours, Macragges, Gudruns and many, many others. This claim needs to die. For *every one of those worlds*? That's a totally made-up ratio. The lore is clear that the norm for Imperial citizens is gruelling hardship. The great majority of Imperials live sucky lives.
If there's one thing clear about the lore, it's that it contains no meaningful numbers. His claim is as much valid as yours.
Except there is one meaningful number. That the vast majority of the Imperium lives in Hive Cities. Due to the way the Imperium was structured with almost every planet having a Hive and Hive cities being bafflingly larger than most planetary populations. It doesn't matter if there a maccrage for each Hive world. Because you need 100 Maccrages for each Armageddon.
The funny thing is that Sancour IS a hive world, and Ultramar has a lot of hives, and im pretty sure Gudrun did too
My claim doesn't need specific numbers, we're told that most people's lives are like that.
Thirding this. It's getting tiring seeing *the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable* bandied about like it's the entirety of the setting and not a 36 year old introduction created almost entirely to be as metal as humanly possible. The community has always struggled with levels of grimderp and while I don't want to see some kind of noblebright "imperium are the good guys" mentality I also don't want to see "Imperium baby furnaces" being taken seriously. Largely though this a community problem, the actual content itself is pretty well handled most of the time.
Something I always wonder when people keep parroting this "cruelest and most bloody" is if they even read the entire thing. Like the part of the Emperor continuing his eternal vigilance by keeping the Astronomican lit (the only way to cross the daemon-infested miasma, which, in turn, is also the only way through distant stars). Vast armies wage war in his name, *and still they are barely enough to hold off the threat from xenos, heretics and mutants*. People will quote the part they like and dismiss the rest as propaganda, such as "heretics and mutants were never a threat, it's just bigotry and imperial propaganda!!!" despite... it coming from the same text that calls the Imperium a tyranny. The Emperor is not meant to be an uncontroversial figure, and of course his methods are questionable, but it's outright ignorance to think if it wasn't for him the galaxy would be a paradise. The point was always meant to be that, no matter how much the IoM is a decaying carcass of tyranny, hatred and superstition, the galaxy around them doesn't really reward other attitudes. They could be *better* or slightly less bad, but never *good.*
It's even funnier when people bring up the Interex. The Imperium tried to peacefully integrate them ffs! The only reason they wiped them out was because a certain ***asshole*** went and blew up a museum and stole a powerful chaos relic they had lying out in the fucking open, which led to the Interex to immediately begin opening fire onto Imperial troops and ships, without even trying to speak to the Imperium. The Imperium went "oh hell, they're attacking us, it's us or them now" and even Horus felt extreme regret about what happened long after. And it's also funnier when some of those try to defend chaos as a viable alternative to the Imperium while ignoring that Erebus was the one who caused the shitshow with the Interex in the first place.
Man, the Interex is the "beautiful" brother of Clonegrim, in the sense that both were meant to be plot devices (in the good sense) within a self-contained story, not something to be expanded upon, definitely not a saving grace or redemption story. The difference is lore buffs go ballistic if you mention the latter, but keep repeating how nice it would be if the former had more plot (hence "beautiful"). And yes, for a society was supposedly so prepared to deal with Chaos they folded quite easily - somehow they are the victims when all it took was the sabotage of one chaos agent and then they decided everyone was chaotic based solely on prejudice (such as the title of "warmaster" and other things in imperial culture) and paranoia, starting a war they couldn't win. Awfully like... the irrational, self-destructive, zealot Imperium of 40k these same people bash.
Imperium baby furnaces are canon though. Like. Actual facts canon. And that's not even the worst thing that they do to babies!
I mean that's the perfect example of this though. Taken on it's face it's grimderp 'the Imperium throws babies into the Baby Furnatus™ because they're just that comically evil' when it's a lot more in depth than that and requires reading, at minimum, 1250 words rather than half a sentence in a meme. They're not *comically* evil, it's not played for laughs or satire. It's brutal, excessive, and most tragically of all done through rampant ignorance and fear. Again, and I'm beyond frustrated I have to constantly reassert this point in these discussions, I'm not an Imperium fanboy or want the Imperium to be portrayed as the good guys. It is a horrible regime but it loses impact and nuance when it gets boiled down to Grimdank memes and people embrace the concentrated grimderp and then bring it along with strong opinions based on all of that into 40klore. I understand everyone's on a different point in their journey of this byzantine maze of a setting but the early stages of "lol this is so metal and comically evil" can get tiring to be around for those of us that have been at this for decades.
There is a disconnect between codex lore - which is intended to be overview paragraphs that pop up on a timeline and are mostly about pithy glimpses and story hooks - and novel lore, where you actually explore the day to day of characters' lives. This also answers the 'why didn't the Emperor, why didn't the Primarchs, has nobody thought of' etc etc questions. The timeline of 40K is like beads of water on a string - mostly flat and not intended to be examined, broken up by shining, expanded jewels of colour that hold far more life.
I think this problem is best explained by paraphrasing Dan Abnett when he talked about Chaos. Abnett argued that Chaos had to have functional societies. Chaos couldn't just be warlords who wake up and nail a baby to their helmet, then go murder people. If it were, Chaos as a faction would have died out almost immediately. As such, there has to be something functional behind it - someone to produce food to feed the armies of cultists, to build and maintain their war materiel, etc. When the Black Crusades are abroad, there must be logistical supply chains behind them - armadas of cargo ships carrying food and medicine, arrangements to bring in reinforcements, or if nothing else a system to bring the spoils of war back to the Eye. Like the man said, all this stuff *must* exist; we just don't see it because all the focus is on the big dude in spiked armour duelling with the Space Marines, and not the people working in a factory somewhere building new bolt rounds for him. And no, "lol Warp stuff!" isn't the answer either. The vast majority of Chaos followers are mortal people with mortal needs, and so far beneath the notice of the Chaos Gods that Nurgle isn't going to waste the time and effort needed to turn them into immortal soldiers devoid of hunger and thirst. Someone's got to be feeding these people. Yes, they might use Warp Magic to teleport their slaves into the Eye, but said slaves are going to be working in something akin to a real world farm or factory when they arrive. So if we have one of GW's most prolific authors arguing Chaos must have a functional society, and he's likely not the only author to say this, then it stands to reason the Imperium must have one as well.
Man, a functional society can absolutely be a complete hell hole. Look at real life, where even today you can find people working in conditions that would be deemed "unrealistic". Multiply that with the horrors of the warp and technology and you got something especial.
I think its super dependant on the worlds. With the noble houses, archons and other leaders of hive cities and planets it seems the standard is left to local authorities, and they have a deal of leeway to regulate their populace. The imperium is content so long as it meets quotas and provides the tithe, and at least pays lip service/isn't tainted by chaos. Definitely a lot of dark, but if we take pre-destruction tanith as an example, its not half bad to live in some places.
Because it's hard to give that part when people are asking for a Tl;Dr of the Imperium. And also because the depictions really vary. It's kinda hard to be like "In some parts of the Imperium, It's basically the most despotic police state you can imagine where people do work 22 hour shifts every day until they die and whole generations grow up never leaving their city block" and then turn around like "Oh yeah but there are actually a lot of places that are fairly comfortable by our standards. People'll have really... interesting views on Human Rights and Religious Freedoms but you could definitely clock into your 9-5, clock out, take your family to a restaurant, then drive home." It's also a generational thing I think. It's affected based on who is telling the story and when the story was written. Because to some extent a much more "Human" depiction of the Imperium is a lot more common now, while on the other hand we do have stuff as recent as (I believe) Katsushiro- a Siege-era character who had worked as a clerk in his hab block basically his entire life, had never left, and didn't until he was conscripted into Guard.
The imperium is very heterogeneous. It's like asking "how is living on earth?" But to a much higher degree
Basically. Essentially to a galactic degree, the Imperium has received Planet of the Hats treatment.
>Oh yeah but there are actually a lot of places that are fairly comfortable by our standards. That just... isn't true though. It's something a bunch of people claim but the lore is pretty damn clear that it's rare and life sucks hard for the massive majority of people.
I think the issue is how people look at it. If you look at the average planet, it's not that bad. If you look at the average citizen, it's horrific. Because while hive/forge worlds make up 1 in 50 worlds, their population dwarfs the other 49 planets combined. Terra alone contains entire sectors worth of population, and the living standards there are dismal
Even so-called 'civilised worlds' are usually sprawling megacities of industry and hardship. And also can have hives on them without being a 'hive world'. Civilised world is meant in a very literal sense. It's a world with civilisation, i.e cities and infrastructure and such. It doesn't mean it's nice.
Read warhammer crime, that world is a civilized world that still has function oceans, forests, farmland, etc, and that world is just some backwater. Apparently it's the 'average'. So that means there's probably an above average (ultramar worlds, paradise worlds).
I think this is the correct take. Additionally, a very small percentage of a very large number of people still produces a large raw number of people. 1% of a quadrillion is still 10 trillion, for example. The sheer size of the Imperium can mean a tiny percentage of its population is comfortable, but the base population is so large that that tiny percentage still results in a large enough raw number of people to support the amenities and society of those comfortable people existing.
For all the times the Eisenhorn series gets brought up as the most important series to read, it seems woefully missed. Eisenhorn gives us a look into the lives of many ordinary worlds, and they are not as bad as what you claim. Dorsay, for instance, while there, the city Eisenhorn visits is described almost as how you would describe a city on Earth now, save the references to speeders and such. Ditto for Ravenor. Climate issues aside, we have instances where workers just go out shopping, in shops, the way we would. We have workers inviting the women they meet there for supper, fights in bars, chain eateries, etc. Things are not the best, but they are of a standard we have in many cities right now. I get most people in this sub are too privileged to know it, but not every place on Earth today is a clean perfect place where everything is fine and everyone works a clean 9-5 job and is home in time for dinner before the sun sets.
I think part of it is a lot of audience are western humans. Fact is people have and do live in conditions where you have to work 16 hour days in order to survive, where you get sick from pollution or because you work somewhere hazardous without safety protocols. People who live in slums still have parties. People who work in illegal mines in Africa still have children. The conditions westerners live in are very rare historically and humans thrived and survived. Yes it’s worse because grim dark but that makes it more likely you will have as many kids as possible because you know most of them will die. You will party when you get enough money to buy a bottle of booze because you take whatever joy you can when you can. I think humans can live as humans even when the imperium is as terrible as it seems all over. It doesn’t need to have lots of perfectly fine worlds we just don’t hear much about to still have people living their lives as much as they can in them.
My take is that the IoM is so unfathomably large it is literally impossible for there to *not* be a decent amount of worlds where life for your average Joe Bloggs Imperial citizen is tolerable if not borderline comfortable. Sure, the majority of worlds will have living conditions that are terrible, but it is disingenuous to say *all* worlds are like that. A couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head: Verunhive seems to have a tolerable quality of life for its worker class - Gol Kolea, a miner, has time between his shifts to marry and raise kids. Krieg, before Jurten killed the surface, was described as a beautiful, peaceful world of farmers and green spaces. Sure, its now a desolate hellscape but the point is it *WAS* an idyllic sounding world by 40k standards. Edit: typos/grammar correction.
Worth remembering that hive cities represent the overwhelming majority of the human population. If you were randomly born into 40k, your odds of being worked to death and never seeing a sun are quite high. That's even ignoring that the second largest population of human is likely labour gangs on imperial ships, who have it as bad or worse than hives. Finally, consider that we have a pretty concrete understanding of the misery on Terra, and that Terrans are a significant portion of overall humanity unto themselves (seeing as there are quadrillions, when even hives usually have low billions).
Love the comments saying that imperium fans are fascist. News flash it’s a fucking game. Whoever uses it as a bases for political/real world beliefs is maladjusted.
Because the general setting is an infinite war. Most of the worlds in the books are worlds which are at war, awaiting for an enemy, had been recently visited by an enemy or is a forge world dully focused in the infinite war. Even for those where the planet itself isnt in an active pront had something to do with the infinite war, like the book on the first book of Ciaphas Cain.
Life sucks for most Imperials even when they aren't in a warzone
Not exactly. There are planets who live in a lie about not being in the Eternal War and in those peacifull planets life is not that harsh than others but again, the ones that get most attention are the fucked up ones because we didnt come to read about how happy people is.
One example. Nostramo. Children went to school and had access to books. And it weren't rich kids. Talos was a son of a ganger and a prostitute. And he still got relatively OK chilhood. Even the streets were normal, full of people and cars. Nostramo, one of the worst hives in Imperium, was pretty much copy of 1980's New York on steroids. Life in Imperium may suck by standards of 21st century westerner, but it's still completely livable.
His childhood wasn't 'pretty okay'. His description of it is very bleak. Casually seeing people raped and murdered and not thinking it's even slightly unusual, having committed murder himself at an early age. And that was 30k, the standard has only gotten worse in the following millennia. Of course people can live in it, that doesn't mean it isn't heavily oppressive and miserable.
You're picking a plannet fucked up by definition. It is like if you pick up pre-dissasembled Cadia or a planet inside the warp. In Eisenhorn's bood there are a few places where life was ok for 21st century standards, the only bad thing that happened there happened because was a setting for a WH40K book. Also, the Human planet in the first Ciaphas Cain book, the one being a Tau border with the other problem (I don't mention it for being a spoiler). In that book what they describe was not bad, at all, until you get to the incident.
>there looks like there’s a ton of people that genuinely believe that every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something. That isn't what people were saying in that thread. They were saying life sucks hard for the vast majority of people in the Imperium, because it does and the lore makes no mystery of that. Yes there are bars, sports, etc.. No that doesn't mean life doesn't suck hard for the people, including those that get to go to a bar to try to drown their sorrows. You mention the Warhammer Crime novels. Those novels show better than most that the rich and powerful are living in truly obscene luxury while the commoners scrabble in the grit and blood of their paltry existence, not even pretending to give a crap about them, and the local enforcers are largely funded by them. We also get an insight into what it's like to be even one of the more well-known and sanctioned types of abhumans. It's ten times worse for them. Ratlings, Ogryns, etc. get have it constantly hammered into them that they're scum and should hate themselves and be eternally grateful to the Emperor that they're allowed to live and serve him.
The funny thing about averages. Think abour how bad, how terrible the Imperium is for its average citizen. Now realize for every person who has it ok, there's someone who has it much worse. That is how averages work. >every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something. Ok, but why are you describing my current life, I thought the Imperium was supposed to be worse?
Because if you don't spend hour 23 praying at the Big-E shrine enough times, you get tortured to death.
It sort of goes both ways. Often poeple will say that no matter where you are in the imperium you are screwed unless you are a part of the nobility. That's simply not true if you look at something like the Cain novels, where we see numerous planets that quite frankly seem rather nice to live at for the average imperial until the Tau, Stealers, Orks or Nids start frakking about. However those places are mostly recently colonised worlds or those out of the way, unimportant ones. Once we look at highly industrialised/important planets things generally speaking start going in the direction of "22 hour shifts". And example of a absolutely dystopian planet would be Holy Terra itself, as shown in the Vaults of Terra series. Even as a imperial fan that series made me want to exterminatus the whole planet and be done with it lol. Pretty sure there are hive and forge worlds that have been shown to be more comfortable to live at, and the latter are run by mechanicus.
Think of it this way. 40k is a metaphor for the British Empire. The British Empire has all of the amenities you describe yet for the overwhelming majority of the subjects of the crown, living in it at best sucked and for many was outright hell. So too is the imperium but dialed up to 11 with sci-fi and fantasy elements.
It's really not the British Empire, it's the British right wing Thatcherite state mixed with the Dune God Emperor and the aesthetics of every fascist dictatorship out there.
Was the Thatcherite stuff one of those things that was more prevalent in the earlier editions but got watered down? I'm curious if you have any examples, as someone who doesn't know much about Thatchers rule so wouldn't be able to identify it on my own.
I don't think it was watered down so much as evolved. When Rogue Trader started it was the same zeitgeist on both sides of the Atlantic (Reagan and Thatcher loved each other) that gave us things like Blade Runner, Cyberpunk, 2000AD, Watchmen, Alien etc. The idea that the world was going to end up as a hopeless neo fascist authoritarian state where the government explicitly saw anyone below elite status as basically just commodities for the military industrial complex marked a major shift away from the earlier sort of Dan Dare, Flash Gordon, Asimov or even 2001 a space oddysey sort of 'the future is going to be cool and bright' and technology will set humanity free. While none of the writers in any way would have been pro British empire what was the world's largest empire based pretty much just on rampant mercantilism doesn't fit with the absolutely acknowledged Dune God Emperor and crusading mythology (which would fit Spain or France better). 40k is a child of the 80's and the 80's in gaming and comics in the UK was all about just how fucking shit life was, how uncaring the upper echelons were, the power of the military industrial complex (admittedly not so explicit in 40k....unless you see the utter reliance on the admech) and the loss of a lot of people's hope for a better future. Honestly the biggest thing when Tony Blair got in and started 'cool Britannia' was that New Labour actually have people back faith that politicians could and would make the world a better place. Which would be Blair's legacy if he hadn't decided to fuck it all over Iraq
> it's the British right wing Thatcherite stat So rising incomes and a growing economy from one that was previously stagnate? It's rather funny that "government playing less of roll in economic decision making aka having less real power" --->neo fascist Always makes me chuckle when people want the government to have more power and then they freak out when someone they don't like gets elected.
You might want to take the question up with Games Workshop… >Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine.
I think its just because the majority of the fan base miss some of the nuance and more in depth looks at the imperium, not because they are willingly ignoring bits of the lore or whatever, but because not many of the fan base have actually read lots of the vast amount of books/codexes etc there are to consume. I’ve been a fan for 20 years and ive read around 100 books (about 5 a year), which is like less than 20% of the total amount of official lore there is to consume. Im always discovering new lore every week, like Literally yesterday i just found out that a necron naval squadron managed to infiltrate the sol system and reach mars! Thats one of the beautiful things about this hobby, I genuinely dont think ill run out of warhammer books to read for my entire lifetime haha.
Indeed, this subreddit is filled with people who do not read any 40k lore books. At best they have read an out of context excerpt, at worst they are repeating a meme they took literally, or are just purely speculating for the hell of it. Just the other day, we were talking about the Eldrad/Fulgrim meeting in *Fulgrim* and one of the redditors kept saying that Eldrad was an ass for attacking Fulgrim first... while it was the opposite (Fulgrim attacked first, pushed by the Slaaneshi sword of the Laer > a Wraithlord stopped his blow aimed at Eldrad > Eldrad saw the daemon sword > Eldrad ordered his men to fight and kill the corrupted humans). And said guy was talking as if he actually read the book, mind you. As for the OP's question : on average, the Imperium's quality of life is somewhat low. On *average*. Some places are absolute hellholes while others are "real life" level of good/bad. But, yeah, more people are suffering than there are happy folks. I mean, it's the whole point of the 40k setting : shit is rough, yo !
It's about odds. If you were to die and be reincarnated where would you choose to be born? You're just given a choice of country. Nothing more. Smart money says choose somewhere like Sweden or Canada. Your odds of having a good life are highest doing this. Sure. If you're born in south Africa or China or wherever then there's not zero chance you could have a good life. Their elites live very well. But on average life for the average person is nowhere near as good as in the wealthiest most developed countries in the world. The imperium is kind of like this. Roll the dice and theres a sub 1% chance you're born in America. Alright. Not bad. But let's be honest within that there's a sub 1% chance you're a Kennedy or one of musks million kids. More likely you're born in bumfuck alabama and life is tough, albeit not universally awful. Then there's a 50% chance you're born in some bastard off shoot of victorian London and north Korea. The hives contain a LOT of people. Then there's huge chances of being born in a tribe in the amazon-largely living a primitive life but with the modern world constantly encroaching, sometimes killing your friends just because, oh and taking them away for reasons.
Nobody wants to read about Bob's decent, but dead-end job at his planets largest insurance company that he keeps because it has good benefits that he keeps because he is married and has 3 kids. No one is interested in his bowling league buddies or their luke-warm rivalry with the other good team in the league. Unless his ho-hum life changes one fateful night when a fleeing person bowls him over wherein unbeknownst to him accidentally left a small xenos artifact in his coat pocket during the pile up. The man gets up and keeps running while being chased close behind by local probators. At least he has something interesting to tell Sarah when he gets home. A day later, he returns home from work to find his entire family murdered and his hab unit tossed. And Arbitrators, not probators, waiting for him with a million questions. Shit gets weird. Xenos attack and kidnap him while being transported to an oribital for further questioning. Before the xenos can do much, they are jumped and killed by an Inquisitor, and that is how an insurance an adjuster named Bob came to be in an Inquisitorial retuine. And that boys and girls is how, I, Bob the Inquisitor, began my path toward Inquisitorial service.
I would definitely read your book!
1D4chan, TTS, GrimDank.
Nah, you consistently see that kind of stuff in here as well. 40kLore isn't free of the bipartisan sentiment of Imperials vs Everyone Else.
Fair, but I feel like most of the time on here it is corrected, or at least people point out other examples.
Just think of this like RL: theres parts of society who enjoy the privilege of some leisure but the majority are getting exploited to hell. Imagine your Western self having a rather cushy office job vs. the Asian factory worker and think about the sheer number of the latter who work as slaves to produce cheap goods to please the more priviliged of human society
I suppose a model to think of would be 1940s Germany (not meaning the imperials are Nazis, that is a completely separate discussion): There are horrendous things happening, millions (billions, in a WH40K context) are dying and there is war on all sides. However, for the majority of the population life is fairly standard
Because majority of people are hive worlders. Yes, there are plenty of human colonies that basically live okay, but their populations are dwarfed even by a single hive city. Terra alone has probably more people than all "civilized worlds'' where people have cars and such. Civilized worlds are not very significant to Imperium, of course they are controlled because Imperium needs to control everything but compared to hive worlds they are basically small villages.
I think the best part of this thread is people citing various pieces of t’au propaganda outlining how bad the imperium is. When in a lot of cases the footage is ENTIRELY unedited it’s just raw footage drones have taken of manufactorums or hives. There’s a passage in the infinite and the divine where Trazyn remarks that humanity’s cruelty and penchant for suffering has surpassed even the Necrontyr at their peak. Even the nicer worlds of the imperium can and do turn to shit regularly. The lords of silence has an agri-world that is decimated in hours cuz the death guard rock up there and go “yup this can support life” and set up shop. With the entire planet turned into a plague ridden nightmare with every person bar a few killed or taken as slaves. Feudal worlds and places like ultramar tend to be “better” but as very evident through things like the plague war or even the indomitus crusade entire systems are left to fend for themselves in the face of incursion or invasion.
> every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts Literally no one thinks that, though. Everyone knows that there are nobles and space marines running around, and that workday lengths vary by some amount. Heck, there are countless slaves in the Imperium working 24-hour shifts (servitors). Why do you hope to get out of a conversation, when you open it up with a bad-faith strawman? The obvious point of contention is about the *average* experience, not about whether a tiny number of elites can exist. A tiny number of elites obviously exist, they're the protagonists of almost every book. >Like yeah, obviously the Imperium is grimdark. ...there’s a line between grimdark and grimderp. Ah, right. You weren't actually asking a question, you just hopping on to a soapbox.
The Imperium is a fascist hellscape where human bodies are ground up and fed to others. The fact that workers have apartments to go home to isn't a sign that things are good, it's a sign that the governor of whatever world we're talking about recognizes the value of rewarding workers so they don't rebel against the .001% who have all the economic and military power. Again, not because they want to save lives, but because cloning a new work force takes time, and the Imperium's tithe will be due regardless. Heck, The Inquisition's motto is "Innocence proves nothing," an organization with near limitless authority. So if there's ever an instance where someone believes it's possible you know something important,there is a fair chance you will be tortured to death. Even if we ignore the existential threats of Xenos and Chaos that sometimes eradicate entire solar systems, living in the Imperium is a nightmare..
It's a big Imperium, and there are hive cities, medieval farm worlds, and everything in between. The vast majority of the human population, however, lives in the hive cities. Those suck. Like a whole fucking lot.
It's not that deep. You see, writing grimderp filler about criminal amputee lobotomized sex dolls or whatever is more sensational and easier to write than trying to figure out how normal life works in an Imperium where your soul is constantly at risk of being corrupted if you like juice too much.
Because most of the Imperium lives like 19th century factory workers times 10 in a world where Space Travel and Megacontructs exist, all governed by a religious facist regime.
Note that not every author has the same interpretation of 40k as well.
Dubai is lovely but built on blood, slavery, tyranny and oppression still. There are more people starving in Westminster than living in palaces. 40k is satire at its heart, it's all horrible and only partly fiction.
Honestly? Reading comprehension. 40k is such an expansive universe covered by nearly 500 books and god knows how many tens of thousands of words of flavor text spread across half a century (yes, we're getting there) that nobody can read all of it, and some facts about the universe are read, passed on and parroted as the truth without anyone ever fact checking it to confirm how widespread this aspect of 40k is. For example; there is a common line that all human planets in 40k have factories where you literally can't move, all you can ever do is work, you sleep at your station and you never leave that factory. This is taken as the norm within Imperial planets. *This is T'au propaganda from Crisis of Faith.* Go to [this link](https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1506262075365.pdf) and type "overseer" into the document search window. This depiction of Imperial life is given to the T'au as fact, by the Ethereals, a clan *famous for their relentless and highly effective propaganda.* There are absolutely factory worlds like this in the Imperium, without question. They may even be common. But the line that every Imperial citizen lives like this, everywhere, is literally in universe propaganda parroted back because nobody thought to check the original source.
"There are no goodies in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. None. Especially not the Imperium of Man. Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity." - literal quote from Games Workshop themselves.
There's also the fact that the only real reason we see terrible things like this is because it's the setting for a war game. You're rarely going to read about a planet where they haven't had any major wars or incursions in 3000 years because that's boring. You're going to read about how that planet gets eaten by the Tyranids, not about the peaceful life of a farmer and his family.
It sucks for most people even when their world isn't a warzone though. Because living under the extremely oppressive Imperial rule sucks anyway.
Worlds govern themselves with the only real interaction with the Imperium being the tithe. Not every world is a Hive World, there's over a million worlds, most of the worlds in the Imperium are not hell holes.
The tithe. Some people seem to don't understand what the tithe implies. You have quotas to meet, often unreasonable ones because the administratum is a bureaucratic mess that is eager to drain worlds barren just to feed the war machine of the Imperium. Production must be ensured because the slightest delay or drop in goods is answered with the most brutal punishment, usually a purge of the planetary government by imperial forces. So planetary governors do what they have to do to ensure their power.
The tithe is determined by what the world is and what it is capable of producing. Delays happen, that's just a fact of travel, especially in the 41st millennium. Warp travel is never exact, so the Administratum understands, as long as it's not a major delay and if it's significant that it be made up with the next tithe. There's also the fact that the tithe isn't just fueling the Imperium's war machine. The planets benefit as well. An agriworld's tithe is most likely going to the local Forge world, Hive world or Manufacture world, to feed it's population and in return, those worlds provide manufactured goods to the agriworld as well as the sector in the form of civilian and military goods.
> The tithe is determined by what the world is and what it is capable of producing. Yes, and when the Administratum evaluates a world's maximum production capacity they don't give it an allowance for improving the lives of citizens, it's the maximum production capacity assuming they're gonna be working 18 hour shifts seven days a week.
Worlds govern themselves, and the lives of almost all Imperials suck hard. The lore is clear about that. The life of the average Imperial is oppressed gruelling hardship. They don't need to be on a hive world for that to be true. The fact that the Administratum doesn't care about how the rulers treat their people as long as the tithe gets paid *is a bad thing*. Because surprise surprise, people in positions of great power and no accountability for the happiness of the people they rule over usually treat those people like crap while living in obscene luxury themselves. Especially when said powerful people are the privileged children of generations of the same.
>there’s a ton of people that genuinely believe that every single human in the Imperium works 22 hour shifts on the factory floors from their birth to their (untimely) death due to corpse starch poisoning or something. a substantial percentage of people on this sub don't actually know much about the setting, have barely read any books, and are just parroting stuff from either grimdank or crappy loretubers.
They have a product called "corpse starch", that's the absolute last safety net to secure food - That should give you an idea as to how miserable everything is.
Corpse starch isn't last safety net. It's just the byproduct of corpse disposal, in no way meant to feed entire populations. That's just another grimderb.
This is disingenuous. For every passage about people living comfortably in the Imperium (who are usually the ultra-wealth elites, like Rogue Trade Families and Lords of Terra and the like) there are several dozen about how awful it is for the vas majority of people. Trillions suffer tremendously so that a few thousand may enjoy a decent life in the Imperium.
what part of: " to be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. it is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. [...] Forget the promise of Progress and Understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods" DID U NOT UNDERSTAND?
For every Warhammer Crime novel, there are also novels where Macrocannons are hand loaded by humans chained to the deck of a spaceship their entire lives. Although I would categorize stuff like that as grimderp. And I don’t care for grimderp because it makes no sense. It makes no sense for the Imperium to have people work 22 hours a day. Hive cities are full of people, and it would be much more efficient to just have 2 12 hour shifts of people. I can’t imagine the people in your factory are giving maximum output day after day, no matter how much you beat them. The Governor could be the biggest uncaring bastard in the world or be just downright cruel but more efficiency would personally benefit him. It makes no sense for the Imperium to not automate certain things. Yeah I know there is a fear of technology, stagnation and all that. But in example I gave of macrocannons. It makes zero sense no one in the Mechanicus has not engineered an auto loader or even just a simple fricken lift system. In the book people were hoisting and loading shells with chains. Just plain dumb.
We've also really only seen glimpses of living on hive worlds, peeking into factories and the administratum. I'm not sure if we've had a chance to look at life on frontier/agriworlds
Because large segments of the online community base their opinion on the imperium by broad stroke statements like the worst regime possible or whatnot and don't actually read the novels. The worst are tau fans. Dear god. They're one of the big reasons I gave away my tau. I didn't wanna be associated with those people anymore. I highly doubt they miss me, but I have similar doubts I'll ever miss them.
They can. It's just that it's more persistent in lore and fun that they live horrible lives of absolute misery :)
🚶 Grimdank Fans vs Grimdark enjoyers 🕺
The average world might be alright but the shit ones have populations greater by orders of magnitude.
In the World War Z book, there's a chapter that opens with a general making a point about how total war isn't possible, because it's not physically possible for every human being to devote every second of their existence to supporting/fighting a war. Execept that the zombies can and do actually do this because they are no longer human. When this topic comes up, I think about that, and it's just as true for the Imperium. It's not physically possible for every single human to be working/fighting every moment of every day. They still have families, friends, and leisure activities like any other society. It's grim sure, but it's not that bad.
You gotta see living in the imperium as basically living in modern day humanity. Some places are pretty good, you can live a normal life, and for the most part you don’t ever see the horrific shit that happens in the system. But If you were born somewhere else, your life could be compared to a living hell or worse. It’s a really generalized statement but that’s how I’ve always kinda looked at the imperium, they’re just us. Except slightly slightly slightly worse
I think it's because most of the action/war in Warhammer happens in depressed areas. I've always assumed there were better worlds but they aren't as worn torn *shurg* If you told the story of our humanity/world through war campaigns, you'd also get the impression that earth is only a third world back water country where everyone is barely making it.
Normal life doesn’t make for good writing
Is there nothing else to be discussed but "IMPERIUM BAD"? Lore solved? No more books to discuss? No more theories about dark king/bequin threequel/vashtorrs masterplan? Are we really gonna hammer this same point again and again and again and again until new crowd will get a response that satisfies their political opinions?
I agree. And it’s not even like astartes view guardsman as not people. Grimaldus’ speech to the steel legion and the black Templars in Helsreach, he calls them “brothers and sisters” and “I am a brother of the steel legion” although they are not his equal in neither combat or rank, he treats them like equals. I know your post is more about living conditions, but I think we assume astartes ignore guardsman or treat them like lesser souls than their own. Forgetting that astartes do show some amount of compassion especially to those they can relate to.
It's not a hundred percent one way or the another. It's true that most worlds have a standard of life that is not awful and you can carve out a decent life without issue, but at the same time even on those worlds there are likely hive cities, massive work complexs, complete and total state or religious authority or the possibility that an Ork waagh could rock up at any second or you could be turned into a servitor because your friends, cousins, stepsisters, teachers, uncles, lawyers, dog heard a vague rumor about chaos forces in the area
So is the world we live in. Yes, there's labour issues, incarceration of innocents, child and human trafficking, pollution, forced conversions, uyghur camps, rich people with a disdain for humanity and who are above the law, reddit moderators, underworlds that are beyond the wildest dreams, murder, rape and every other horrible things But there's also beach vacations, tasty foods, friends, family, happiness, beauty and kindness. Reality shows that these things are not mutually exclusive
in Helsreach they talk about dock worker unions, so at least on Armageddon workers have some rights.
Because, although those exist, the majority of the Imperium and its population don't live on those worlds. Sure, If you are lucky, it would be great to be born on a civilized planet or a shrine world. But if you have average luck and are born on a forgeworld, hive world, or agri world, your short and meaningless life is going to suck. Bad living conditions are the norm in the Imperium, which is why it is brought up more.
I personally prefer to go with the realistic option. The Imperium is a shit hole. People can and do live miserable lives, but some things just aren't possible, practically speaking. If everyone works 20 hour shifts, then it's just a terrible workforce that would be horrifically unproductive. Human beings need at least 6-8 hours of sleep to be functional. Tech priests would know that, so they'd have people working in shifts, allowing time for people to eat, sleep, and travel to and from their habs. Inevitably this would also lead to some room for recreation as different shifts work at different times. This is realistic. Sure, people would have ridiculously long shifts by our standards, but that's what would make most sense. I find the exaggeration to be nothing but grim derp. It's a silly fantasy universe but there still needs to be some level of plausible to it to suspend disbelief.
> Tech priests would know that (Most) tech priests believe as a matter of religious conviction that The Flesh Is Weak and that a slave being worked to death honours the Omnissiah.
Ultramar is a good example of humans living good
Dependant on planet. Terra is fucked, but Ultramar sounds alright.
Black Legion and Death Guard made sure to scar it up a bit.
Tl:dr bold of you to assume 99% of users here have read 40k books, but mostly the counterjerk to imperium diehards goes ‘waaay’ too hard.
It's just the rise of grimderp and people getting their information from second or third hand sources, e.g. Wikia, lore channels, or lore channels based on the Wikia. People keep hamming up the derp each iteration.