The Nightmare Truth of the Imperium of Man (100th Episode Special) (Warhammer 40K Lore) 

It was terrible the way he accidentally brutally set himself and his entire hab on fire while cooking is corpse starch.

@@OculusImperia - Was that before or after he slipped, fell and rolled onto 38 bullets that he'd left carelessly lying around?

@@OculusImperia In seriousness though, I adore the character development Oculus has gone though. Going from a wide eyed cataloguer of propaganda to where he is now would be an abrupt and uncharacteristic turn if it wasn't handled with tact. Tring to imagine Oculus saying those opening lines even a year ago would be out of character, to say the least. Now though it feels like a wholly natural development. You've done a wonderful job weaving his changing worldview through his broadening perspective.

I for one, will miss him.

@@OculusImperia "The Inquisition has conducted an internal investigation and determined that the Inquisition has committed no wrongdoing."

🙏 YOU ARE TOO KIND MY DUDE 🙏

I couldn't help but notice how you misspelled "appalling", an easy mistake to make to be sure.

Or is it a template laid down as fantastical dream. Furthermore investigations could prove truthful dialects have been spoken. Heretical to ponder else.

@@lunaeek9130 That is apt..

I think it's worth nothing that at the end of the day, and I'm so happy that this was brought up near the end of the video, that endless darkness and evil and murder and horrible nonsense isn't fun either. The tragedy of the Imperium is just that, a tragedy, and a tragedy isn't compelling without someone to identify with. A murdergorefest where everyone is despicable and nobody is worth rooting for isn't a tragedy. It's the template for a reality show. Not that you're asking for that, but it's something I encounter often with fans of Warhammer 40k; any attempt at inserting hope, inserting the possibility of a brighter future, at simply acknowledging that good things can happen, even under the most horrific regimes, is often treated with scorn and ridicule. A middle ground must be struck, one might say, a compelling story must arise from a mixture of all of the elements. Sure, you can't fix it overnight, and that would end the setting and exploration of just what horror it is, but you have to have the possibility, otherwise there's no point other than just reveling in the angst.

Does that mean Gulliman has seen this video?

Yeah.... about that.... subscriber thing.... before long it will turn out that most of subscribers who don't identify as Alpharius, others wear funny hats, leather coats and carry bolt pistols with ....

You don't think they have the Tube on all of grand Ultramar?

Where is that quote from?

@@DeHerg lol my brain but i appreciate the compliment

stop being a buzzkill. its not writing

@@ac300 i'm very sorry i didn't take your tastes into account when i posted this ten months ago. Also who ARE you again?

Dude that’s evocative as fuuuuck.

His mind is no fortress, it is an empty field ravaged by torment and chicken

"mY mInD iS nO FoRtReSs! iT iS aN OpEn PaStUrE RaVaGeD bY iNtErNeCiNe CoNfLiCt... and chicken *nom*"

Still waiting for the day the Oculus records his dreams of a newly-(TTS)-voiced Emperor.

I KNEW IT!

If you really look at how life on Terra is, one would almost think that one was upon a Daemon World. Its so twisted and bent towards hatred, zealotry, and mind numbing indoctrination, one would thing that only devils live there. Even Pilgrims to Terra all die and never return home.

Worst case of suicide I’ve ever seen!

@@tunguskalumberjack9987 did he have dirt on the Clinton's ?

@@randomicus4782 😆

and this was before he tragically stumbled out of his basement window and fell down 30 floors

Then landed on a flyer that collided with another flyer carrying a Dark Angeles traitor

I haven't read the Eisenhorn ones. Could you give me a spoiler what exactly they did?

They seeded the toxic clouds above the hive to make it rain and create clear skies for the military parade. Flushing that many pollutants into the planet's systems at once caused severe environmental damage.

Glad you enjoyed it, it was an incredibly rewarding script to write and I'm happy that shows :)

@@OculusImperia I can hear the catharsis in your voice. Writing from the perspective of the Oculus must be so difficult not just because of his perceptual heresy, but because the information he can obtain needs lore support and the imperium is a constant thorn.

Best episode since the Pilgrimage to holy Terra.

Idk why but reading this comment I just imagine a random person kissing oculus on the cheek 😂

This!

But all his devils are here.

Tzinch is false hope, a promise of better world, while in reality what you will achieve is different gray colours on your cage. Also hell being empty implies that hell forces already came to the regular world.

Here's something I remember reading about Tzeentch, an attempt to summarize Warhammer in a single sentence that I'm sure many of us are familiar with: "There's a god of hope, and the god of hope is evil."

Honestly you could read the whole thing as an indictment of the fascist trope of the strongman leader. Like, even if you had an immortal genius superman capable of uniting all of humanity under a single political block, the inevitable consequence of that would be the slow, agonizing decay of that block once his ability to personally maintain it was inevitably compromised. The Imperium's desperation IS the Emperor's ambition, the same mad grasp at the stars still playing out millennia later, and the fact that they call good what he called necessary evils only indicates a folly on his part just as deep as theirs, a comfort with necessary evils stemming from the basic assumption that he could never be an overall force for evil in the universe, intentionally or accidentally, and nor could his Imperium. He never second-guessed anything he ever did, and a million wailing worlds now pay the price for his egotism and arrogance.

The point of view for the video revolves almost entirely around Terra and lesser hive worlds. In a million worlds, many spend many generations as fairly benign places to live. The Emperor is and was effectively a deity in knowledge and power. Is there a long term plan? Has the Emperor's plan been derailed? He most certainly doesn't match the merely human tyrants he is compared to and criticisms inevitability reduce the Emperor to that merely human standard. GW has purposefully totally obscured many details, retconned absolutely critical lore into its reverse and hinted at the fact that the current state of the Imperium is both a fallen ideal AND just as planned. Also, never discount GW's lack of coherent oversight into lore, which led directly to one known chapter of Astartes being the only one not declared by the Emperor as traitors, later "fixed" by retcon, destroying the entire lore of that chapter other than its name. In the meantime we get the worst of totalitarian regimes, of the modern godless socialist stripe combined with a rather stupid parody of the Roman Catholic Church based on fake mythological tropes of Christianity from the 19th Century (what I call the Century of Myths from all of the pure male bovine excrement being spewed by the intelligentsia of the period). Why? Because it sells better. The history of an agworld that has been peacefully providing food for generations is irrelevant. Look as Gaunt's Ghosts, the Tanith One and Only. Tanith had existed for apparently millenia as a peaceful and nice place to live, but we only see it the night a Chaos splinter fleet decided to exterminatus it in passing for shits & giggles, or maybe an arcane ritual sacrifice, it's really hard to tell.

@@MagusMirificus Part of me feels that it was all intentional, that the Emperor actually wanted the suffering and misery and eternal war. It doesn't really make sense that he was purely well-intentioned. That only seems like an act to deceive in order to achieve what he really wanted; Pure chaos and churning destruction. Contradictions, confusion, despair and misery extended and prolonged like torture to the end of time.

​@@inthefade It sure does look like he deliberately sowed seeds of mistrust in all the sons who betrayed him, and he did say to Dorn as he was being fitted into the throne that things had gone "Not as well as I had hoped, but not as bad as I had feared", so the idea that the Horace Heresy was a planned part of the Primarch project and the current degraded Imperium is more or less precisely what He was trying to create does have legs. I'm partial to the view that the Emperor, despite all his insistence upon not being seen as a god, and vocal championing of the supremacy of humanity, does not actually identify with humanity at all and sees them as one of many things which are infinitely beneath him, much like other similarly advanced lifeforms in fiction such as Doctor Manhattan or the Tralfamadorians. The fact that most primarchs, custodes, and space marines, all of whom are supposed to be genetic echoes of the Emperor himself once they're made, seem to openly posses this attitude towards the baseline humans they encounter adds credence to this. He does not conceive of himself as the champion of humanity, but of *order*, and his vision for the galaxy is as absolute as the chaos gods', and just as unlivable by human standards. The absolute tyranny of the current Imperium is not a deviation from the Emperor's vision but merely a pale reflection of it, the crumbling tyranny of a crippled Imperium where the Emperor would have had the absolute tyranny of an unassailable Imperium. The Emperor is a transcendent, multidimensional being who opposes Chaos as absolutely as Chaos opposes the material plane; the body he puppeted for a while and which now produces the astronomican is likely a very small part of His existence and one which means very little to Him, the entire glorious golden age of the Imperium something He mostly did on autopilot while his attention moved between literal millions of other clandestine aspects of His ultimate plan to enfold all of Being into the order of His will. All of which are presumably going just as poorly as the Imperium project, since 40k is obviously the story of the inevitable entropic process of Chaos, both uppercase and lowercase C, overtaking the galaxy, which is why the image of the Emperor is such a perfect centerpiece to the whole thing: the cold, skeletal grip of Order, revealed in all its nightmarishness against a backdrop increasingly devoid of any ambiguous mix between the two, ever desperately trying to wrench reality back into its clutches. The desire for order does not shrink in response to being rendered impotent by the innate chaos of the universe, it grows to match it; just as all the collective terror of the age of strife coalesced into the towering authority of the Emperor, so all the carnage dealt to the Imperium by Chaos has sharpened the brutality of the Imperium's oppression to a diamond tip. Not to mention likely made the silent Emperor's ultimate vision a thousand times more cruel than the reality at any given moment, as He continues to account for His every failure to keep things under control by setting His sights on an even higher level of authority, His efforts becoming ever more widespread and terrible even as they achieve nothing but giving the enemy more strength. For it is the arrogance of Order that the one thing its all-seeing avatar cannot perceive is the futility of its mission, the way nature absorbs your every effort to master it and turns it back on you, mocking your pathetic attempts to swim against the current of Existence itself. Before Order felt the need to incarnate itself, humanity attempted to collectively impose it upon the galaxy, inadvertently contributing to the conditions for the hemoclysm that followed and almost consumed us, and with the self-inflicted loss of that path towards galactic hegemony Order simply appeared as a great golden man and fashioned the vestiges of humanity into a single-purpose weapon. Order's promises of human supremacy had never been grander, but the conditions of the species had never been worse, and the grandiosity of the endeavor invited the equally grand catastrophe of the Heresy. And in response to THAT, Order transcended its material incarnation to become an eternal, omnipresent symbol of hatred, fear, and ignorance, a scowling skull seered into the collective unconscious of the galaxy, and the cruelty inflicted in its name has never been more widespread, so that presumably suited its purposes just fine. It may not have been His first plan, but Order never had a first plan, it is only reactionary towards chaos, forever making new plans out of the failure of each subsequent one, always attempting to fully encompass the unpredictability of Being, always finding it has grossly underestimated it, always coming back with something vastly bigger and more terrible in a vain effort to finally get the jump on this ungovernable reality.

​@@inthefade I think he just straight up underestimated the Chaos Gods.

Look into the "Shape of the Nightmare to Come"

Thank YOU for the kind words and support!

lmao, I dropped in and it's got 666 likes and 6 dislikes and still 66.6k subs. I guess OI is the reincarnation of Nero

He is going on vacation to the eye of terror so he should get lots of relaxation... Of his bowels.

@@OculusImperia you're welcome for my service

It's worse than that. It's a fascist war machine that exists so that it may survive.

@@valuebrandmelkor5973 warhammer 40k is the perfect example of how terrible fascism is, it is hatred incarnate

@@zoeissleepy708 Oddly enough, the characteristics of 40k's Imperium has semblances of elements of Soviet's Patriotism and it's in-wing rival of Trotskyist notion of "permanent revolution" (something which even Stalin abhors lol), this is on top of how The High Lords in the later Imperial Cult periods resembling more of Oligarchic bodies with messy bureaucracy and Neoconservatism along with neoliberal incursion of it's Black Market and Space Pirates commissioned by Imperium through various World systems It's a fuckfest of modern ideology under the facade of Crusader-like imagery and hyper-edgier version Star Wars' Empire, it's ultimately cannot be taken seriously for it's perpetual nature were originally designed for Games Workshop's milking machines (alongside it's less famed and slightly more optimistic sibling of Warhammer Fantasy/Age of Sigmar settings)

@@ohamatchhams mmhm, its a bastard fusion of different kinds of authoritarianism, its a dialogue on just how bad authoritarianism is and how we cant continue on with it

1984, the Salem Witch Trials, Nazism, Stalinism, Mccarthyism, Cointelpro, Jim Crow, and Apartheid. Every campaign of genocide and every disregard for humanity stirred in a pot, left to steep, and served on fire.

By humanity. The Emperor tried to turn dirt into diamonds

@@StarboyXL9 all the while being but a fly

what do you expect from a guy who has more in common with the eldar than humanity.

At least Baldermort is just a happy servoskull, bopping and humming along throwing dice and moving mini's.

@@erikrungemadsen2081 Nobody charges a servoskull with heresy. Balder was thinking with his galaxy brain

@@StarboyXL9 The episode Balder made with the inquisitor discovering Baders servo skull and going "nope! To weird for me, not getting involved if theres is no heresy." had me in stiches. the 100K SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL was awesome, cant take to long before Oculus hits 100K.

Literally the only way it could have happened.

I just discovered this channel. Apparently, he's a character that went from a Propaganda loving Historian to someone who realizes the truth of the Imperium. Basically roleplaying a character arc over 100 videos. An Arc of a person struggling with great realization.

To be fair I like a bit of both. The space power fantasy stuff is fun, but it is really held up by this underlying dystopia of every sort mashed into one unendingly hopeless nightmare. I'd even say it makes the space fantasy stuff even more hilarious.

They really should. Get on that GW!! 🙂

It hasn't turned out great for other community creators they've picked up so far.

@@Interrobang212 so I’ve heard. Particularly for the kiwi who made “Astartese”. However I like to hope it would be different for the Black Library division. GW has always been clingy with IP going back to Warcraft and Starcraft. With Disney sniffing around GW they have good reason to be terrified. There eating and destroying IP faster than he nids eat planets.

@@mikewaterfield3599 What was the issue with the guy who created “Astartes”?

@@Barabel22 basically GW took creative control of his IP under contract.

Best I can do is corpse dust and a hard mat to sleep on.

You have access to cookies? Made from dough, not corpse starch? What are you, a worshipper of Slaanesh?

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is no time for cookies.

Lmmfaoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Damn, it's pretty impressive that he was able to accidentally slice his own head off with a shaving razor and then tie his hands behind his back before the Inquisition could stop him.

@@BigTylt still it could have been worse....he could have alleged that the government lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction!

@@BigTylt Not to mention that his razor turned out to have an ancient dark age of technology relic miniaturized melta bomb inside that rather violently destroyed all his records in the blast.

I hear the Saturnine moon of Mimas is quite lovely this time of year…

Even an ogryn could deduce that

Hopefully it would be a Recongregationist whose attention is caught.

Gee what made you think that? Seems pretty innocuous to me...

That's just another chance to chat up Inquisitor Verity Calendriss.

This kinda misses out that those very same people are also prioritizing themselves over everyone else by serving hell. They aren't paragons: they, infact, reinforce the Imperium's beliefs. Chaos, and their followers, are not in any way shape or form better than the Imperium. The better conditions they offer are an illusion. The hell followers of Chaos rule is a hell in which everyone is fighting with everyone else, with no bonds except what is beneficial to both parties in that moment.

Nailed it

Based

Curse Arch the Neverchosen

@@MrAsaqe as one Creative Assembly dev put it so eloquently: “Fuck Archwarhammer.”

Of course you do. It's a part of you. And who are you to deny your own nature? t. Someone, probably

My sides 🤣

Depends on what part they glimpse. If it's the internet they'll probably want to Exterminatus us, and I wouldn't blame them.

Glad to see the reference.

[distant Inquisitor Calendra noises] Thank you so much for the kind words and support!

Yup. That's the problem of a feudal system, it's all delegation to tiny scale tyrants. The kind of people who would rather burn everything they rule down than let someone else have it. Useful, while there is an enemy at the gates and your support of them is assured... a grand impediment, when you need to centralize the governing of an empire.

@@Sorain1. Warp travel and astropathic communication, limit the extent to which centralized control can be exerted. Ye another reason why the Emperor was really keen on the webway project.

@@williamfrancis5367 Oh I understand why they went with it, feudal systems have massive issues... but they do function. (after a fashion.) If he'd gotten the Imperial Webway going, the Imperium's administration would be a lot different. (and likely better.)

@@Sorain1 They might have been able to get a functional democracy working (but I doubt the emperor ever desired to do so.)

Perhaps more competent, but certainly not better. The Imperium was created by the emperor, it’s incompetence only exacerbated the issues, it didn’t create them.

Huh, I interpreted them as blaming a corrupt subversion, as apposed to the consequences of the basic setup.

@@jdcrosier2682 What do you mean?

i preffer 10,000 more , not just 100

Citizen, you are doing the emperor's work. The White Scars include your teachings in their indoctrination ceremony's.

And for the 66,6K subscribers, when releasing this episode

Oh, and also occasionally castrate someone. Still the comparative good guys.

Besides the castration…

(Extremely loud incorrect buzzer)

​@@bloodraven1190why do you hate minorities

The Inquisition, I believe, would disagree with your statement. Now report for servitor conversion heretic!

"Why do I still live? What more do you want from me? I gave everything I had to you, to them. Look what they've made of our dream. This bloated, rotting carcass of an empire is driven not by reason and hope but by fear, hate and ignorance. Better that we had all burned in the fires of Horus' ambition than live to see this." - Guillman on state of 40K Imperium

He'd probably be like, "finally, a sane person to commiserate with."

"True, but politically inconvenient."

@@FaizanMunirKhanRajput the beautifully tragic part: this very state of the imperium was shown to both Horus and Alpharius and was what (in part for Horus) drove them to rebellion to begin with to prevent it.

@@DeHerg It was a self fullfilling prophecy. The actions they took to prevent that future, actually ensured that this dreaded future would indeed come to pass.

I was thinking along the same lines. It is magnificent work.

If anything the Imperium is amongst 'least bad'... that does not make it good.

It's far from least bad.

@@patrickking3124 It's definitely amongst the least bad if you ask me. The Tau are, of course, much less bad, an argument could be made for the Craftworld Eldar, but te Imperium, with all its flaws, is definitely in the top 4 'least bad' Note this is not an endorsement of the Imperial way. Occulus is spot on. It SHOULD be better. But it's not. It sucks. I would not want to live there. But most other things in that 'verse suck more. I

@@BazilRat only if you apply a human scale. Orcs and Drukhari seems happy with their respective society's. Necrons might be more miserable than humans, but 80% of them can't feel or think. Chaos-humans and the Imperium are the must miserable factions for their inhabitants and maybe craftworld eldar slowly dying out.

It really is! I don't think GW could come up with something that so genuinely epitomizes the nature of life in the 40K universe if they had 100 years to do it.

I feel dumb for having to ask, but which episode was that, again?

@@danielmclellan1522 The Daemon: A Treatise Upon the Nature of the Daemonic

Are you positing that the Lord Oculus is a wretched Felinid mutant?

@@venerablebrothergoriate5844 probably the Emperor's person Felinid friend

We're not that far from that reality TBH.

@@piotrd.4850 yeah man, we're only a couple apocalypses behind

@@piotrd.4850 North Korea bears a uncanny resemblance

The servitors would vote in ways many of us would rue. Quite unlike the real world... LMAO!

Heretical? Debatable. It would certainly be treason. But the imperium despite the emperors best efforts to the contrary is a staunch theocracy, and the concept of civil lav separate from nebulous religious dogma is all but gone. I believe most in the imperium would chose to ignore the direct order of the prince regent if it were to go against their own interpretation of the old canon. The fact this allows them to act independently in their own interest is just an additional convenience. Put simply old rowboat doesnt carry a fraction of the authority or worship the faded memory of the dusty corpse of the emperor does. Probably because it is much easier to puppet the words of a corpse.

Not even the arch traitor will want him. He is too skeptical to embrace chaos, too broken by the Imperium to subtly support their creed. His only place is to remain in obscurity, his warnings and fears unheeded

Muhahahaha.

For me it was the "I wish to be a good man. I wish to help" line. The sheer sorrow in his voice makes it all the more tear-jerking

Yes inquisitor this one right here. God this comment section is just packed full of heretics.

*Daemonculaba intensifies*

*angry gas mask noises*

*Praise be to chaos undivided.*

Blood for the blood god.

I mean I’m still going to play lamenters. Nothing will stop me from getting screwed over while saving civilians.

this is a great channel. it is one of my favorites . there are other lore channels that are good but nobody else does it the way occulus does it . most give lore from an outsider perspective but he does it from an inside perspective which makes it completely unique. he does a great job

@@commissaryarrick9670 ...now if only he could finish series lol

"So is everyone else Brother."

"In this universe, there are no good guys. Except the Lamenter's, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Blood Ravens, and Salamander's."

The Imperium is fascism taken to its ultimate conclusion: horror, death, suffering, ignorance, and stagnation. 40k as a universe is a lot of things. A game, a piece of fiction to be enjoyed, a product to be sold, an experiment in genre, a hobby. But one facet of it I would argue that is often ignored or only lightly explored is 40k’s function as a cautionary tale warning against the specter of fascism.

Agreed - this a wonderful note.

Perhaps an answer to the "is the Imperium fascist" discussion. And the answer is "sweet naive child, it is oh so, so much worse! And it has been so from its very beginning." And are there places that are exempt from the nightmare, are there places of justice, light and hope it is only because they have avoided the attention of the great and powerfull.

Count on it :D

It's wild to me it's been that long. Thanks so much for sticking with the channel all these years!

Very well put. The awareness of the horror keeps it afloat

0. Silent King.

2 is the best option

Maybe a Tau during the first sphere?

It certainly was a supremely interesting exercise in the writing of it :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CITIZEN!

the greatest thing is that this gives word to many feelings, woes and existential dreads that many of us feel. the best thing is that a number of people who want to hear this will. the worst thing is that the people who NEED to hear it won't.

I'm sure some do but some also bring it up at every opportunity like a "gotcha!" if you like an imperial character or faction. That can get annoying too for those who the Imperium IRL would be terrible ut consider it cool/fascinating/etc in fiction. I'm not even saying this as an Imperium fanboy, I'm generally drawn more to xenos (specifically Eldar)

@@sunnysidesteffen8658 the C.I.A are on your side, don't for one second think you are some sort of resistance, you are the crushing machine fully indoctrinated spreading the word of cecularism and trusting in science blindly as you ignore the rot you are completely surrounded by, the people you think need to see this, are watching, and we think you are fools.

@@highmarshalhelbrecht4715 cool :P

@@highmarshalhelbrecht4715 What?

This is a fantastic comment. I try to look to the sky more and more often these days. There's something beautifully poignant about it. Not to mention it keeps your chin held aloft.. which is, of course, paramount during times such as these.

I do and I did :) Delighted you enjoyed it so much!

@@OculusImperia It honestly sounds like you hate being a citizen of the Imperium. Which credits your voice acting and writing skills. But unfortunately that sounds like Hersey to me! Go to jail (bonk)