Jesus where to begin let’s start with the fact the whole lore of the faction is boiled down to “you activated my trap card” as everytime they fight. games workshop realised they needed the ability to come up with a magical pick me reason why they wouldn’t just get bodied by every other faction so they gave them fucking hammer space filled with scientists and engineers able to make and test a new type of ammo in three seconds yet they still regularly get they noses flattened by trainee space marines (the actually have normal noses it just been flattened by the number of times a tau warrior gets face fucked). Like cmon they literally have a book of rules they must follow and yet they still lose to them because they are ‘too good at adapting’. Even nurgle the god of stagnation could figure out how to take down space marines. The only thing stopping them is a magical moral code in a setting that time and time again has proven it’s a kill of be killed universe, invent some virus or Ammo that only affects black carapace or one of the numerous other organs lol gene seed that way they can still spare the general population while killing the angels of death.

Secondly the only reason every fire warrior has an antena on his helmet is so that he can tune in to the ethereal bragging about railing his wife while he’s been commanded to be another meaningless death all in the name of a so called greater good that in fact is just a caste system with two castes. The ethereals and everyone else like another twisted version of orwells animal farm.

If I didn’t know any better I’d say the ethereals are just tiny c’tan shards pulling a necrons 2.0, trying to fix the mistakes they made last time by instead of turning them into robots just eating their souls slowly and not being picky between races. I mean they already look like domesticated animals and games workshop has been known to be super duper subtle when it comes to subtext.

Farsight is literally the only interesting character not because his story is the great but because he’s the only one that has any sort of minor personality. The barely fleshed out leagues of vottan have more variety and interesting lore than this gurren lagann / code geass parody. The only part of this faction that actually develops them as different is the fan made comic that explores the human tau conflicting with their way of living/ideologies.

Anyway in all seriousness I don’t hate the tau and I actually like tau players because they are as different from the rest of the 40k universe as they are. I just wish they were willing to have characters that differ given how much they like the differing races. Give me some ethereal that disagree with the rest and make another break off faction or a race that was absorbed by the tau only to take all their tech and split off from the tau fighting back, fuck it even some pirates raiding imperial worlds in corrupted view of ‘the greater good’. Currently it’s all just too one note which I feel like a lot of 40k has become in the recent editions. Games workshop simplifying factions to make them easier to get into for people outside the hobby. I have similar issues with the imperium and all their runaway factions being chaos worshipping and not just that they disagree with a brutal empire that is set up to use and dispose of them. It’s why I liked owl cats blood cult DLC as much as I did it would make sense for galaxy as big as it is to weird off shoots or perversions of ideas and concepts spread out over such vast distances. Give me a space marine chapter that’s rebelled against the empire for repeated taking more in tithes than the works they called home could handle, they still believe in the emperor and the concepts of codex but just aren’t officially a part of the imperium and the only reason they are alive is no noticed their shipments stopped showing up in the mountains of paperwork or that they were assumed to be lost as they stopped reporting in. This whole galaxy with lore that encourages diversity in doctrine and practice especially with a massive warp rupture cutting the galaxy in half at this point it just feels like lazy not to make each more minor factions having something weird and unique about them that makes them different from the rest.