22:21 remind me of that Pratchett quote "Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun."
Cam's ability to explain this without descending into jargon is impressive. I think what I love the most though, is that he ties it up with a thesis on why this matters to the setting rather than just being a series of details about it.
I literally wrote a paper in undergraduate political theory about the Imperium that took exactly this stance, and I'm so happy to hear someone that I admire as much as Cam state it in a wholly unique way.
Wait, Jacob did a loredump about Exalted? I NEED to hear that. Exalted is my favorite RPG even though it is impossible to get in to, it is such a wonderful experience.
Wow that felt like a fever dream of my college experience, combining studying physics and stat mech, magick and the occult, and learning my way around roleplaying games and fantasy worlds
The lectures are great, but the homework is grueling: every 40k video game on max difficulty, with bonus points if you complete a paper on tips and tricks for each one, complete with diagrams, screenshots, and memes.
The concept of "the warp" or something like Mementos in Persona 5, a realm where emotions coalesce into entities, that interpenetrates our experienced world, seems like it should generate helpful entities in addition to the extremely dangerous ones portrayed in these settings. I guess that's harder to market?
If the warp gods are a reflection of our most basic instincts, what does it say about us if they're all terrible? This is probably the core of the darkness of the setting, it's a universe where there's no goodness deep down inside, only horrible things and suffering. It's a setting that believes that people, and life in general, is fundamentally bad.
The Warp reflects the material universe, and as of the 41st millenium (and for a long time now) the universe has been filled with war and suffering an a galactic scale. Yes, it is possible for helpful (or at least non-malicious) warp entities to exist, but when they most common and universally experienced emotions of most sentient beings in this galaxy are suffering, hatred, etc. the warp will (and does) reflect that. There's lore that implies the warp was a lot more calm and peaceful before the first galactic scale conflicts, as well as lore that suggests the imperial religion's "living saints" may indeed be warp entities that defend humanity, but the majority of the warp is currently filled with misery because that's what the material universe is also filled with.
In addition to what’s posted already, the chaos gods aren’t evil. They’re monsterous, but think about the emotions they represent, violence is the most questionable because khorne wants violence for violence’s sake, but plenty of people use violence to save or help people, slaanesh and Tzeentch are far more obvious, Slaanesh is the god of pleasure, among other things, but there’s an entire school of philosophy that claims that happiness is the ultimate good. Tzeentch is growth & change, the popularity of those concepts should be obvious in any election cycle, and Nurgle represents the status quo, and the number of stories that’s end-goal is retuning to status quo points to that desire, so there is good to each of them, but I really like Cam’s explanation of them being largely unthinking, because it means that daemons are mostly just trying to make you experience whatever it is they represent, but can’t distinguish between positive or negative effects, so Slaanesh is going to make you feel something, because that’s what it knows, and the easiest thing to make you feel is pain.
@@The_Murder_Party Cameron has said that they represent those emotions taken to extremes; Slaanesh isn't just about pleasure but about pleasure at the expense of onesself and others; Nurgle isn't just about acceptance but about hopelessness. I guess what I mean overall is that I would imagine that such entities would (in a world without the assumption of grim-darkness), be moderated by the diverse ways people experience these emotions without purely destructive results. (Note; I don't actually play 40k, I just have found its lore interesting since the commander decks came out and Cam has discussed the lore)
I think Cam puts far more thought into the 40k and the Warp here than the authors ever did. Though i do dislike the idea of "the cruelest regime imaginable" being a rational response, it excuses the people ruling the Imperium, that is, by the setting conseit "Cruelest Regime Imaginable".
I think the idea is "We must be this horrific, because if we weren't we wouldn't survive this universe" and considering the imperium has survived 10 thousand years, their methods while utterly awful, have been successful.
I'm sorry, I enjoy Cam talking about 40k hugely, but some of this is not accurate and other stuff is debatable. I have to preface this with WH40k is intended as a setting that doesn't ascribe to the concept of canon in it's lore, the intention here is that you can make up your own space marine chapter for example and it's considered just as real as any of the GW published ones. This leads to the one of the few WH40k rules on canon "If GW sold a model of something, ever, it's canon", and there is an ork miniature, from the early 90s, for Stormboyz of Khorne. Orks can and, although rarely, do worship Khorne, they even fight in normal ork Whaaags. I'd also argue that the conceptualization of the chaos gods as things mostly influenced by non sentient entities, and acting according to the emotional experience of those beings is demonstrably wrong through written lore. This might have been the case before Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle coming into their current form during the War in Heaven (basically the first conflict fought on an intergalactic scale in the galaxy) but it's clearly stated that the extreme emotions of the sentient beings in this war provided the emotions that fed these three warp entities and elevated them to be the Ruinous Powers. The warp itself changed during this time as well, from comparative calmness to what it is now. It is debatable whether they are sentient though because they are absolutely slaves to their own nature, they do very much act in a way that can be considered to be sentient though. They each, strategically, work towards the downfall of the other powers, which is called the Great Game, but also band together when times call for it, as an example. It certainly wouldn't be a sentience similar to that of humans, or any of the races in WH40k though, except for maybe the tyranids. Still stuff like this falls very much under an intentional umbrella of "make of this what you will".
It's easy to eye roll, but you know what? I sincerely respect your dedication. Thanks for the insight into something I still find incredibly daunting (and this is coming from a Star Trek enthusiast); even after all the GW product I've purchased in the past. Kudos to you.
I'm legitimately curious: In spite of your quibbles with Cameron's lore explanation, do you still agree with his overarching thesis that the Empire is a logical (albeit flawed) response to the existence of the warp?
Yes I am certainly quibbling, the Stormboyz of Khorne "range" of miniatures consist of a single model published in 1991, an Era of GW that could very much be described by "let's throw things at the wall and see what sticks", the rest is debate in and about a setting that prides itself on being vague and not forthcoming with explanation or absolutes. I'd say it does that, outside of providing room for creativity to the players engaging in it, exactly to further discussion of the setting and how it relates to the real world, especially considering when, how and why the setting originated in the real world origins. Now getting the tldr out of the way: Yes I think it is logical/rational response, albeit inside the following definition of those words. I also think this is only relevant in discussing whether the setting manages to suspend disbelief. I take the words "logical" and/or "rational" to mean that you can draw a thread of causality from any point to another in the events of the setting, unbroken by any in-setting impossibilities or other things that would obviously break suspension of disbelief of a reader. The important take away here is the complete lack of any positive or negative connotation in this definition, either ethically, morally, good or evil. As such asking whether actions or behaviours inside a setting or work of fiction is logical or rational is asking whether the author/s have been successful in world building. As soon as you remove the lack of connotation from the definitions of "logical" and "rational" or step outside of the discussion of effective world building/story telling, both acquire a very heavily implied "only" preceding them. They acquire an apologetic, justifying, characteristics absolutely not intended by the authors of WH40K. WH40K (Rogue Trader at the time), and the Imperium of Man specifically, was written as a satirical criticism of Thatcherism/Thatcher's Britain, both the government and large parts of the British population during that time. At the core of this satire lies that the way in which the government is attempting to solve problems is actually making it worse. Thatcherism eroded social safety nets, marginalised trade unions, promoted deregulation and centralised remaining government power. In WH40K this is reflected in the way that the Imperium treats its population. On the social side Thatcherism promoted a conservative world view rooted in Victorian values, anti-intellectualism where it served them, and Methodist belief, rejecting the permissiveness of society and curtailing, even in law, the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQIA+ community. Here we have the omnipresent hate and eradication of the Other in the Imperium, and the Imperial Creeds abhorrence of other sentient races, psykers and mutation in humanity. The aforementioned “only” shouldn’t creep into discussions, implied or not. The way the Imperium works is one outcome, one way, to arrive at after countless logical or rational decisions, the wrong outcome, resultant of many bad decisions. The setting actually depicts a few alternatives; The golden age of technology didn’t falter because of the warp, it did so because artificial intelligence going haywire. The human civilisation of the Interex spanned systems, had technology on par, if not better than that of the Imperium, and a populace educated on the dangers of the Warp. It also handled the Age of Strife far better than Earth. They also didn’t have too many problems with that, until the Space Marines came along. The intended impression for the Imperium of man is: These are space fascists, it’s all going wrong for them because they’re space fascists, and because the corpse emperor is and was as fallible as any human. GW has been trying somewhat, since furthering the plot of the setting, to wash all of this away. It really isn’t a good look when the best selling miniature line is Space Marines, the Übermenschen of the Third Space Reich. Anyway this is already a page, and I’ve cut pages to it keep short.
@@TheViperZed I think Cam hit on an important point when mentioning that ignoring the warp completely didn't work that ties into the Thatcher satire, just swap "warp" for "plight of the common people" and between the noted satire and Cam's read on it looks to me like Games Workshop painting a picture of the path from neoliberal takeover to fascism.
