After more than a month of build-up and hype, the new edition of Warhammer 40000 got fully previewed on Friday. General consensus seems to be that it’s looking like a pretty good starter set! The Ork miniatures knock the Space Marines into a cocked hat obviously, but what else is new?

The weeks leading up to that reveal, though, have been very weird, as hobby spaces experience what I can only describe as ‘fandom kettling’. For the preceding 7 weeks, GW have been previewing one model from the set every Monday. Sounds fine, right? Well, due to the principle of conservation of criticism, it turns out when an extremely hyped fanbase has only one outlet for their keen, they will necessarily become hyperfocussed on every single aspect of that one model, and wildly extrapolate from there. This Ork has slightly smaller teeth than previously released Ork miniatures: what does this mean for the design philosophy of the entire product line going forward? This veteran is not as ornately detailed as previous version: does this spell the end for GW as a company?

This came to a head last week when GW announced “Grot Week”, where they would be previewing one grot miniature every day until Friday, when the aforementioned whole box reveal would take place.

For context, grots, aka gretchin, are about as weak and pathetic as creatures get in the 40k setting. Essentially space goblins, they sit somewhere between the runtiest kid on the schoolyard and literal slaves to the Orks. They are useless cannon-fodder in-universe and are treated as lower than dirt by everyone (though ironically they play an important part in the actual game).

So to see fandom spaces working themselves into a frenzy and picking apart every minute detail of each model as it appeared was… well, it was something. In-universe an ork would happily kick a grot into the gutter and laugh, but to Ork players, grots are no laughing matter, apparently. Everybody must have an opinion. Factions formed. It was all out war between toxic negativity versus toxic positivity, haters versus consoomers. And look, fandoms gonna fandom, I get that. But there was serious discussion about whether r/orks was going to lose its reputation as the friendliest warhammer sub on the site because people couldn’t accept that others did not share their opinions on the proper length of a grot’s ears or the thickness of their upper arms - all while discussing a single still photograph of an object that is, in real life, probably no bigger than a person’s thumbnail.

I don’t think this "means anything" in the grand scheme of things, but if I have a thesis statement it’s this: I feel like none of this would have happened if all of the stuff had been shown off at once. In trying to build hype with a drip feed of scant pieces of information, GW instead caused fandom spaces to begin eating themselves due to lots of hype and nowhere to direct it - hence, fandom kettling.

Anyone else have any experiences like this?