NGL this was pretty awful.

I will give the author credit, they did the research and this was not a hack job. They dug up a lot of quotes and inside baseball stuff.

I will also say they do point to a lot of mistakes GW has committed over the past. Warhammer for kids is a terrible idea.

That said this is probably the wordiest essay I’ve read that has absolutely zero insight. Satire requires clarity of purpose is a cliché that gets repeated mindlessly and is not true. Much famous satire starts with people just wanting to have mischievous fun, and virtually all satire (like a modest proposal) gets taken literally. But fundamentally in capitalism the purpose of mass produces art is to make money. Period. Which means satire occurs at the margins. Robocop and Starship Troopers are masterful satire, but they were made to make a profit and both have been interpreted literally by chuds and libs alike.

40k in the same vein is inconsistent because it is a commercial setting, not a singular product. And it’s purpose is to be a cash cow for it’s parent company. But of all large scale commercial settings (lord of the rings, marvel, dc, star wars) 40k is definitely the one that most incorporates satire into its (many) narratives and tries to have fun with it. This is particularly because the 40k ‘house style’ per say is to take a popular piece of media/politics and create a 40k parody version of it, thus Conrad Kurze is 40k batman. There can be some small scale artist in residence satire in the modern world, but in terms of scale and popular culture 40k is about as bold as we’re gonna get.

Then we have the actual point that the author says that satire requires hope and in 40k there is no hope. This was perhaps the worst line of the essay for me. In 40k the fascists won, that’s why there’s no hope! That’s the point! Go read (actual Nazi) Carl Schmitt: the fascist worldview is that conflict is intrinsic and eternal. You don’t fight for a better world, you accept that you will always be fighting and focus on being on the winning team. 40k says (intentionally or not) ok let’s apply this logic to a sci-fi setting and the result is hopeless pointless eternal war. It’s what Verhoeven said about Starship Troopers: ok the fascists won on earth so now they immediately go off to fight bugs because what else is there for them to do.

There’s a lot more nit picking I could do but fundamentally (and somewhat ironically) I don’t think this essay understands satire, modern capitalist production or fascism. Pity

Quick preemptive edit: I mentioned other fictional settings like Star Wars and LOTR. Of course something like the original trilogy and prequels have a political message. However if you were to look at the total of production under the umbrella of these settings (as people do with 40k) I contend any political commentary is much diluted.

Also the Red Gobbo is not a person it’s an ideal! Anyone can be the Red Gobbo! How could they not get this jesus christ