The world of Warhammer 40,000 is dark and makes no secret of it. There are hardly any happy ends, there is always war and allies can be found temporarily in the best case. This is too dark to a user, but fans think: it is actually not that bad.
Warhammer is not nice and doesn’t want to be. If you ever find yourself in the dark future of the 41st millennium, you can probably choose whether you will be eaten by alien beetles at some point or slaughtered by brutal mushrooms.
Even if you somehow manage to escape the war, the chances of a “beautiful” life are rather bad. Most of the people in the empire live in the slums of the metropolitan worlds and poorly feed on fader nutripastes and corpse strength. If you want to defend yourself against it, you quickly have the guard or the church on your neck.
Nevertheless, or maybe because of that, so many fans are enthusiastic about the world. On Reddit, a user cannot understand that at all. He says he knows dark universes like Halo. But Warhammer is just completely over it.
One of the darkest moment of the history of Warhammer 40,000 is Horus-Häresie:
Warhammer 40,000: The Cinematic trailer for Horus-Häresie, the great brother war
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“Would prefer to deal with the flood than with this universe”
The thread manufacturer complains: “In this universe, everyone is evil, nothing really happens. No matter whether you are a simple guard and follow the cult of a guy on a golden throne or are a guy who follows the chaos gods.”
He says: he would rather face the Flood from Halo than to have to assert himself in the world of Warhammer. The flood are quasi virus zombies. The classic parasites that affect and contaminate people. But Halo still has people who argue for order.
Warhammer, on the other hand, is a world in which there is no clear separation between good and evil. There are several gradations of moral gray, but nobody is really “good” here. Even the imperator, which is generally considered to be moderate, is not as benevolent as many may think.
Fans jump in and explain that this is the point that is so good for the Warhammer. And in this way the world was so exaggerated that the whole thing cannot be taken seriously anyway.
“It is so screwed up that it is already cheerful again”
In the top comment, a user means. “As a lover of 40k, I find it so dark, so screwed up that it closes the circle again and feels cheerful because it so is exaggerated. ” Other, grim universes are much more anchored in reality.
In fact, Warhammer relies on completely absurd exaggeration. The poster boys, the Space Marines, are literally genetically improved overhenemakers with too many organs, superpowers and weapons that a normal person could not even raise.
On the other hand, there are the chaos gods with their completely exaggerated domains. Slaanesh has quarrels who can literally kill music. Nurgle’s trailer constantly repellent and are proud to collect as many diseases as possible.
In a way, Warhammer is a parody of fantasy and sci-fi settings that take too seriously. And that’s exactly what the fans celebrate. If someone tries to bring reason here somehow, it often comes in the answer: “You didn’t understand the setting.”
The motto of Warhammer has a good reason
Warhammer advertises with the saying: “There is no peace in the darkness of the distant future”, or in the original: “In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future there is only.” The universe has even significantly shaped the sub-genre “Grimdark”.
And despite the comic exaggeration, Warhammer can really, really, really dark. A user, for example, refers to a thread that shows an extract from a novel. There a few imperial guards are eaten with lively body of tyranids and dissolved in their stomach acid. A little warning here, the text is very detailed.
The fact that Warhammer does not take into account here, but is full of this dark, often exaggerated imagination, is exactly what fans appreciate. And in the end it always depends on the perspective whether someone is really “evil” or not show something good somewhere.
Warhammer has been a popular franchise for ages and even inspired Blizzard 40 years ago. So much that the Warcraft makers actually wanted to play a Warhammer game at the time, but then decided against it: In a perfect world, the biggest MMORPG today would be World of Warhammer