I feel like this would be more relevant in the writing and art room. Which elements of the lore and 40k universe would you put in a game and how would that impact age rating in various countries and how would that impact sales. While also trying to stay truthful. Usually for things like that it’s better to hint at it happening, or has happened in the background.
It’s why in most media (video games, movies, etc.) they don’t normally explicitly show things like infanticide, torture, civilians getting killed, sexual assault, etc.
When we come in for the game we’re already well past the horrors and into the aftermath, just killing enemies that don’t pull on your empathy. While the Imperium has obvious moral issues it’s hard to see Nurgle as the morally superior position and so almost anything is justifiable in the pursuit to combat the larger threat.
CMing the community is, I would assume, mostly keeping a similar line drawn. I don’t see people doing fan art to what Nurgle followers did to the civilians in Vermintide 2 or Darktide before the player characters got there. And if someone did, it would probably be taken down.
To quote Vonnegut “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. […] I have told my sons [and daughters] that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.”
are you given medical insurance or access to good therapy services considering alot of folks use community managers as punching bags. ive always wondered what is there to help you guys to combat this.
Yes, there’s a lot less use of “funny little guys” or absurdist humor present in the fluff… but it’s hard not to read a lot of the work and observe widespread use of irony or exaggeration (the “grimdark” setting itself is satirical).
The use and subsequent perversion of religious iconography and blind faith throughout 40k is an indictment of the dogma present in religion; particularly the penchant for utilizing zeal and fervor for the emperor as an on-the-nose proxy for religious extremists.
Depictions of governmental bureaucracy as esoteric, unfathomably complicated and bloated requiring such concerted effort to achieve even the most banal and insignificant outcomes.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the Horus Heresy books lately and there’s still very pointed commentary being made, some of it directly addressing the “later” 40k devolution of humanity and society as a whole.
Just because there’s a subset of the community genuinely too stupid or ignorant to understand satire does not mean that it isn’t still satire.
We can question the efficacy of the satirical content given that it does seem to draw folks who unironically idolize fascism xenophobia and bigotry, but those folks are the butt of the joke. They are the target of the ridicule: incapable of introspection, enamored with the surface of the fictional universe established because it’s edgy and cool, completely ignorant of the subtext.
That’s a good example though for where it is not really satirical.
This is exactly what bureaucracy does, in reallife.
Have you ever seen the documentation work at the higher echolons of company? Specifically American or German ones?
Nevermind the political commentary of your post I want to point out, that the world today isn’t the same it was when Warhammer 40K was first released.
Society has gotten a lot more volatile. Things that were fiction last century are now firm part of our reality. As this has happened, the real world has nudged closer to more extreme fictional universes, while those in turn haven’t changed.
For example: There is little satire left in a zealot killing people for choosing one simple wrong word, when in the real world cancelling people over their personal opinions from their job (and source of income) has become the norm.
This was unthinkable in 1980’s America.
There is many other example I won’t get into due to the sensitive nature of that. But summarized: There is simply little satirical elements left you couldn’t also take serious now. Our world has approached treshhold of absurdity, which grants once-satirical works like Warhammer now validity.
We have flesh-made automatons sitting in front of computers for +8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Doing their entire professional careers nothing but filling out forms and sending them in. The depiction isn’t quite as hyperbolic, but if you take the high-fantasy imagery away we come pretty damn close, don’t we?
thats the point tho, satire isn’t fiction its meant to point out flaws in the real world by various means like extremism
having a extreme version of a clerk in fiction to show where the path leads is exactly what its supposed to do.
But that’s where it also has the potential for not being satirical anymore. If it hits close to home, it can be quickly interpreted as real enough.
Now I’m not saying WH40K is realism. But what I am saying is that we are experiencing more and more dystopic examples in reallife that hit close to home with a franchise like Warhammer’s writing - Compared to 20-40 years ago at least.
Your replies have amounted to: “The Onion predicted reality and thus is no longer satire,” which… that’s not how satire works.
Society seeing themselves in the mirror and continuing down the path doesn’t change the intent to hold up a mirror while saying “this is you, stop being like that.”
That’s more a failing of society as a whole than a failing of a work of fiction intentionally pointing out atrocities and very blatantly painting the picture that NOBODY depicted within the universe of 40k is “good”.
Honestly you’re just further fueling the argument. Corporate greed and control are seeing humans used as machines (this isn’t a new trope, this has existed in sci-fi from the beginning), toiling away at pointless tasks to be replaced when they fail.
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement.
no i disagree if it doesnt hit close to home than it fails at being satire not the other way around.
you’re supposed to reflect onto your own life, if its not reflecting aspects of your life you won’t even notice
imo thats the way to learn having parallels…
politician “…we the people…”, yes exactly…
wait a minute thats word to word what the Authoritarian guy from the novel said! why is that? looking up populsim
That’s exactly how it (doesn’t) work. Poe’s Law in action. Some 15 years ago, an Onion article might have been “Sir dresses up as school girl cheerleader to enter ladies restroom”. If that was posted today, you’d take it for some yellow tabloid news article of some minor thing that happened last week at the high school 3 blocks away from you. You’d not see it as satire, because now it actually happens.
It might not change the intent, true. But your argument was that certain people are being numbnutz for taking it literal and not seeing the satirical aspects. And I simply provide a reason for why that might be the case. When the world moves closer in to the previously satirical works, a new generation of people might no longer experience it as satire.
Fair point. But that doesn’t change that the satirical aspects have gotten more authentic to us now compared to then.
yeah but whats the solution here? talking real slow like you would to a toddler so EVERY last person on earth could deduce that its not serious?
there are always people who won’t understand, lack education or simply direction to come to the conclusions
we shouldn’t try to make everything digestable to everyone thats foolish
You’re arguing that it isn’t satire while ignoring the literal definition of satire.
Again: it’s not the failing of the work of fiction saying “HEY THIS IS JACKED UP, THE WORLD SHOULDN’T BE LIKE THIS, IT’S RIDICULOUS”, the fault of not being able to see that reality is becoming this nihilistic nightmare lies firmly at the feet of those unable to see that something is fundamentally wrong with that and the society bent on blinding simpletons to the fact that it is not how life should be.
I kinda already addressed what you brought up back here:
It’s satire. You’re arguing the efficacy of the satire, which… you’re not wrong. But as Cedric points out:
Since you make the argument that something absurd became something we take at face value truth.
→
im failing a bit here, i don’t quite see how the sentence would be classified satire back in the day?
since you say it wouldn’t have happend back in day, it also wouldn’t be something society needed to be satired on, hence it would be a purposeless joke or am i missing something?
OP was discussing how a CM deals with the heady and often uncomfortable subjects tackled within 40k, given that it’s based in satire and utilizes that platform to discuss that discomfort with a bit of levity provided by the fictitious nature of the works, I’d say we’re still within bounds of the original topic.
You’re right, not everything should be digestable by anyone.
For an ongoing franchise to stay in the role of providing hyperbolic sarcasm, they’d have to change the goalposts along with society to stay on the outer borders, rather than going along with it.
For instance, the Onion writes even more insane articles today than they did 15 years ago. Here of course the difficulty is to stay ahead of the curve.
You could also just leave it as the Warhammer Franchise has done. But then you have to be okay with some people just not getting it being satire.
That raises of course another issue and that’s the whole “Who associates with whom” debate that seems to be at the center of it in the first place nowadays. I have no idea when it became okay to demand creators and producers of goods to draw clear lines on what their works mean or who they are for. That’s silly to me.
When Fatshark for instance releases a game and it’s picked up by player groups who are “undesirable” to have around, it isn’t on Fatshark to take their product and the sale back and play curator. Why should it?
If you release a book today and someone highly dislikable picks it up, is that your problem? If they interprete it wrongly? No, never. In this instance we just have to be more tolerant ourselves and accept that we can’t micromanage everything and everyone under the sun. It’s that simple really. I know. Unpopular concept.
Yes. True. It’s not on the creators of the satire when things are no longer distinguished fully as such.
A deep problem here comes from the audience - And people in general. Few seem to value nuance now. An important task for someone interpreting another person’s work is to view the material in it’s appropiate context and historical timeframe.
People nowadays judge a lot of things of the past by modern standards and then give some really unintelligent commentary on it. Not realizing they are debating in bad faith.