Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Joe here. I also host the Alliance at
Speaker 2: by Donkeys podcast, a military history podcast. We talk about
Speaker 2: all eras of history, trying to make things funny and interesting.
Speaker 2: And if that sounds cool to you, you can come
Speaker 2: see us live May twenty ninth at the Rich Mix
Speaker 2: in London. There will be tickets available for live show
Speaker 2: and a ticket available for live streaming with video on
Speaker 2: demand so you can watch it later. So get your
Speaker 2: tickets now. They will be in the show notes and
Speaker 2: I hope to see you there.
Speaker 3: Oh, welcome back to Well. This is the Behind the
Speaker 3: Bastard's feed and this is normally where you get new
Speaker 3: episodes Behind the Bastard's but every now and then we
Speaker 3: try something new. And in the not too distant future,
Speaker 3: I'm planning to be launching a new podcast with my
Speaker 3: friend and fellow Giant nerd Joe Kasabian, also a fellow
Speaker 3: podcaster or Hey Joe, how are you doing?
Speaker 2: Hey buddy, it's good to be here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're wanting to do We're planning to do
Speaker 3: a podcast on Warhammer forty thousand, which is a game
Speaker 3: system that some of you are probably aware of and
Speaker 3: others of you maybe aren't. I think a lot of
Speaker 3: people know about this now it's reached kind of a
Speaker 3: point of cultural critical mass. I think a significant chunk
Speaker 3: of people on the Internet are just kind of casually
Speaker 3: aware it exists in a way that they weren't when
Speaker 3: we were kids and started playing this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent. I remember back when I first
Speaker 2: heard about Warhammer through the books, like nobody really knew
Speaker 2: what it was other than other people that would fall
Speaker 2: into that fan zone. But now anybody who doesn't even
Speaker 2: know it's a miniature, maybe they know it from like
Speaker 2: the Total War games or whatever. Yeah, it's definitely the
Speaker 2: biggest it's ever been.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I the podcast, we'll you know, talk later
Speaker 3: about what exactly the podcast kind of things the podcast
Speaker 3: will be covering, But this episode, I specifically wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about the intersection of Warhammer forty k and like
Speaker 3: pop culture and pop politics in the United States and elsewhere,
Speaker 3: because it's one of having a surprisingly large impact on
Speaker 3: like the way people communicate on the Internet and the
Speaker 3: way people talk about Donald Trump in particular, that's really weird.
Speaker 3: But before we get into that, because I think that's
Speaker 3: the thing that's going to be relevant to everybody, even
Speaker 3: the people who you know aren't into the game at
Speaker 3: least can get something out of this stuff, which is
Speaker 3: why we're putting this up as our teaser episode in
Speaker 3: the Bastard's Feed. But before we do that, Joe, you've
Speaker 3: got a book to plug.
Speaker 2: I do my debut gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn
Speaker 2: comes out May twenty ninth, so you can pre order
Speaker 2: it now, which is the best time to get it,
Speaker 2: so when you when it arrives it'll be nice and.
Speaker 3: Fresh, excellent. Well, everyone one should do that, and everyone
Speaker 3: should listen to the episode, which you have no choice
Speaker 3: but to listen to because I'm going to start reading
Speaker 3: it to you and you're already listening to the podcast, right. So,
Speaker 3: if you're at all into social media and up to
Speaker 3: date on the current political hors of our age, you've
Speaker 3: probably heard President Donald Trump referred to as God Emperor Trump.
Speaker 3: Currently that phrase alone returns about four million results on Google,
Speaker 3: and that is a reference to Warhammer forty thousand in
Speaker 3: forty k as its fans call it. The God Emperor
Speaker 3: is the founder in deity of the Imperium, a vast
Speaker 3: million world empire that includes nearly all human beings. He
Speaker 3: was once a mighty warrior and a deadbeat dad, but
Speaker 3: he spent the last ten thousand years or so hooked
Speaker 3: up to life support. So you can already see. You know,
Speaker 3: the guy likes gold. He's always covered in gold, and
Speaker 3: he's a terrible father. So you can see why Donald
Speaker 3: Trump gets compared to him from time to time.
Speaker 2: Right, Hey, I mean recently Trump posted a picture of
Speaker 2: himself as Jesus Christ, so maybe he's maybe starting to
Speaker 2: buy miniatures.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. And the Emperor, being a being
Speaker 3: who's lived tens of thousands of years, is kind of
Speaker 3: insinuated to maybe have been Jesus or at least somebody
Speaker 3: who like profited, you know, was influential in starting the
Speaker 3: early Church. He's been insinuated to have been basically everybody.
Speaker 3: But you know, getting beyond that, if you haven't don't
Speaker 3: know anything about Warhammer and you just heard the phrase
Speaker 3: God Emperor Trump, you probably didn't think too much about
Speaker 3: it outside of like, oh, people are being weird about
Speaker 3: politics again in the United States, right, can you? It
Speaker 3: couldn't be right. Trump is kind of a singular figure
Speaker 3: when it comes to global media attention, so it's not
Speaker 3: all that noteworthy that fans of a game would reference
Speaker 3: him in memes. What makes this one unique is that
Speaker 3: people using the phrase and spreading memes about it are
Speaker 3: kind of as likely to be mocking the president as
Speaker 3: praising him. It's a real Schrodinger situation, and this aspect
Speaker 3: of it is really well embodied by something very funny
Speaker 3: that happened on February eleventh, twenty nineteen, over in Italy.
Speaker 3: The Via Reggio Carnival is an event held in via Reggio,
Speaker 3: a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade
Speaker 3: in celebration since eighteen seventy three. It started when a
Speaker 3: bunch of rich guys decided to make a parade with
Speaker 3: floats that would help put the city on the map
Speaker 3: in a cultural sense, and rather than funding the parade themselves,
Speaker 3: they push to increase taxes on working class citizens and
Speaker 3: poor people protested by wearing masks and presumably committing petty crimes. Right,
Speaker 3: So you've got like a classic story here. It really
Speaker 3: is a beautiful thing. I love a good carnival, And
Speaker 3: kind of the key feature of this is there's these
Speaker 3: huge paper machet floats, the largest of which weighs like
Speaker 3: forty tons that people make spend the year making. There's
Speaker 3: are massive things, they're the size of buildings. And then
Speaker 3: like walk through the street, right, and there are drive
Speaker 3: through the street I think now, and there's these big
Speaker 3: drunken parties and everybody wears masks and it's a great time.
Speaker 3: About half a million people attend each year. And twenty
Speaker 3: nineteen was like any other year, except that the pride
Speaker 3: of the was a sixty five foot tall sculpture of
Speaker 3: Donald Trump as the God Emperor.
Speaker 2: Of maid Joe, would you showed me this picture? I
Speaker 2: lost my shit. I had never seen this.
Speaker 3: It'll be the thumbnail image of this. This one's not
Speaker 3: going to be a video episode because it's a special one,
Speaker 3: but I do kind of want people to see it.
Speaker 3: If you just google like Trump God Emperor, float, parade
Speaker 3: float or something like that, you'll see pictures and it
Speaker 3: really is something. It's massive, right.
Speaker 2: I would love to be into the planning meeting on
Speaker 2: that one, because you know, it took a small to
Speaker 2: medium sized team to build this monster. Yes, someone had
Speaker 2: to pitch that idea to the rest of them and
Speaker 2: explain exactly what the fuck it was.
Speaker 3: It was several people's whole year. The guy behind it
Speaker 3: is artist Fabrizio Golly, who created it as a critique
Speaker 3: of Trump's presidency. Some of this is obvious if you
Speaker 3: like really look at the details of the statue. There
Speaker 3: are like four blue twitter birds flying around the sword
Speaker 3: handle the Emperor. Like this is based on off of
Speaker 3: like a drawing in several drawings of the Emperor where
Speaker 3: which is these guys wearing huge a huge golden suit
Speaker 3: of power armour with like eagle's wings on it. He's
Speaker 3: got a massive flaming sword. Everything about him is gold.
Speaker 3: Often he has glorious long flowing hair, the kind that
Speaker 3: Trump doesn't. But yeah, in the float this big Sordi had,
Speaker 3: there's like twitter birds flying around the handle, which Fabrizio
Speaker 3: put there to make the point that Trump had weaponized
Speaker 3: Twitter against his enemies. And written on the blade in
Speaker 3: Italian was the phrase your taxes and your duties, and
Speaker 3: the specific way that these were written in Italian was
Speaker 3: meant to be like bring up a different phrase, which
Speaker 3: Galley summarized as meaning, here's your fucking tariffs, right, like
Speaker 3: that's the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of
Speaker 3: like prescient that he really picked those out as being
Speaker 3: a weapon in a way, they weren't nearly as much
Speaker 3: in twenty nineteen as they are now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it still kind of works as a bit
Speaker 2: of imperial propaganda. Yeah, Like this is one hundred percent
Speaker 2: something that that the Emperor would have said to like
Speaker 2: a planet in revolt, like here's your.
Speaker 3: Here's your fucking tariffs with a literal sword. Yeah, Fabrizio
Speaker 3: said of this quote, it's a joke, but in fact
Speaker 3: he's trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of
Speaker 3: nuclear missiles. This is one of the strongest actions let's
Speaker 3: say that powerful people like Trump can use. So we'll
Speaker 3: go back to Fabrizio in a bit. But what's relevant
Speaker 3: to my point here is the point I was making
Speaker 3: earlier is that as soon as pictures of this float
Speaker 3: get online, they go viral. People are sharing this like crazy,
Speaker 3: and Fabrizio's meaning sailed right over a lot of people's heads.
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote now from an article in Time.
Speaker 3: Many conservative commentators on Twitter appeared to interpret the float
Speaker 3: as a tribute to Trump. Several tweeted that was a
Speaker 3: parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for
Speaker 3: right wing Channel one American News wrote, this carnival in
Speaker 3: Italy looks a lot more fun than the Thanksgiving Day
Speaker 3: parade in New York. Just look at this Trump float.
Speaker 2: Ah incredible. Everybody knows it can't be a Trump float
Speaker 2: because it wasn't sponsored by coinbase or right like.
Speaker 3: Right, no one was selling crypto. It was twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: It couldn't have been affiliated with Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, nobody could rug pull the parade.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I do you know if the Emperor was
Speaker 3: a real character, he's got to be a lie. He's
Speaker 3: he should be alive then, because he's like thirty thou
Speaker 3: forty thousand years old when the game starts, which means
Speaker 3: theoretically the Emperor could have bought in fts. Right, that's true,
Speaker 3: his madness could be entirely driven by all of his
Speaker 3: apes getting stolen. He set him down the.
Speaker 2: Path the thing that really drove him to combat chaos.
Speaker 2: If someone tried to explain the concept of a slurp
Speaker 2: juice to him.
Speaker 3: No, I got a ruled humanity. You people can't cover yourselves.
Speaker 2: Fuck, you can't be fucking trusted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Warhammer forty thousand and the God Emperor character
Speaker 3: have existed since the nineteen eighties. For most of the
Speaker 3: time that the game has existed, it's been a fairly
Speaker 3: obscure pastime. It requires a lot of money in order
Speaker 3: to actually play the game, and it used to require
Speaker 3: a lot of money just to like buy all of
Speaker 3: the books and guides that would teach you anything about
Speaker 3: the game at all. But social media and video games
Speaker 3: have introduced forty K to the masses in a way that, like,
Speaker 3: you don't have to spend a lot or even any
Speaker 3: money to at least consume the lore. A lot of
Speaker 3: people who are fans have never played the game. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe they play some video games, but a lot of
Speaker 3: people just like watch hours of YouTube videos, and those
Speaker 3: YouTube videos are largely regurgitating decades worth of lore that
Speaker 3: have been like written and stored in websites or put
Speaker 3: in wikis. Like that's all. That's the hobby to quite
Speaker 3: a few people who call themselves fans, and so as
Speaker 3: a result, when the long simmering US culture war ignited
Speaker 3: the world of gaming a year or so prior to
Speaker 3: the start of the Trump campaign, forty K became a
Speaker 3: battleground too. The fact that the imperium that the god
Speaker 3: Emperor ruled was in the text of the game a
Speaker 3: fascist state, which was you know, largely the subject of
Speaker 3: satire in thee made it kind of an obvious inspiration
Speaker 3: for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The fact that, like, people who were playing forty K
Speaker 3: were usually playing one of the factions affiliated with this
Speaker 3: evil fascist space space Empire. Even though the game was
Speaker 3: satirizing the evil fascist space Empire, part of it all
Speaker 3: meant that there was like some room wiggle room for
Speaker 3: folks to get in and try to like propagandize to people.
Speaker 2: The all they need is a tiny bit. There's always
Speaker 2: enough wiggle room. It's like a mouse smashing itself under
Speaker 2: a door. There's nothing you can do.
Speaker 3: Right, right, especially since like it's it's part of its
Speaker 3: wiggle room, and part of it's like, well, what do
Speaker 3: you like Angry young men who aren't great at like
Speaker 3: being socialized to do well? They spend way too much
Speaker 3: time playing games. I say, as an angry young man
Speaker 3: who wasn't well socialized, but it was, you know.
Speaker 2: Sensing myself in these comments.
Speaker 3: Yeah, playing a lot of Warhammer, right, and hey, I'm
Speaker 3: well socialized now and I still love Warhammer.
Speaker 2: That's fine, goddamn right, which is always wild to because
Speaker 2: Warhammer's inherently a social game. It is like even with
Speaker 2: all the video games or whatever. If that's how you
Speaker 2: want to consume it, great, But the second you cross
Speaker 2: that line and start buying mini is you have to
Speaker 2: go into a room and start talking to him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at some point you're going to have to be
Speaker 3: around other people if you really want to do it.
Speaker 3: So God Emperor Trump memes started spreading on four Chan
Speaker 3: back in twenty fifteen, right around the same time Trump
Speaker 3: announced his campaign, and December twenty fifth, twenty fifteen, a
Speaker 3: YouTuber named Talent uploaded a video that collected a bunch
Speaker 3: of early memes, entitled it Donald Trump Emperor of Mankind.
Speaker 3: Talent was a very small time creator. We're talking about
Speaker 3: a thousand subscribers, but this particular video broke half a
Speaker 3: million views, and part of it, like the imagery in
Speaker 3: the video, is there's a famous piece of art from
Speaker 3: the lore of the game. That's the emperor fighting his
Speaker 3: son who betrayed him, over the body of one of
Speaker 3: his other sons that was murdered by the betrayers. It's
Speaker 3: a very famous drawing and they just included that, but
Speaker 3: they hadn't swapped out the Emperor with Donald Trump very crudely,
Speaker 3: and I believe Hillary Clinton was playing the role of Horace,
Speaker 3: his evil son. I'll do a screen share so you
Speaker 3: can see this, Joe.
Speaker 2: That is very confusing.
Speaker 3: This is a real beautiful find. I think that's Hillary
Speaker 3: in there. Yeah, that's Hillary.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's Hillary. That's Hillary.
Speaker 3: And then there's a there's Donald.
Speaker 2: Who would have thought? Who would have thought that Donald
Speaker 2: Trump was Hillary Clinton's gene seed father.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is implied the meme because again, this is
Speaker 3: his son, who is the evil he's fighting. So yes,
Speaker 3: this kind of is implying that Hillary Clinton was created
Speaker 3: by Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: And she's absolutely towering over him.
Speaker 3: She was way cooler. She just killed an angel. It's
Speaker 3: pretty sweet. So the meme broke. The God Emperor meme
Speaker 3: broke mainstream awareness in twenty sixteen when New York Times
Speaker 3: reporter Jonathan Weisman wrote about the hate mail and threats
Speaker 3: that he received online from Trump supporters. Quote from that article,
Speaker 3: the anti Semitic hate, much of it from self identified
Speaker 3: Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since Trump God Emperor
Speaker 3: sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless hook nosed
Speaker 3: jew I was served in an image of the geists of Auschwitz.
Speaker 3: The famous words are bite, mocked, fry replaced without irony
Speaker 3: with maccin America.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 3: So again, this guy and this journalist like Weiseman doesn't
Speaker 3: recognize that this guy's making a warhammer reference or at
Speaker 3: least right about Yeah, it's just like the the username
Speaker 3: of the guy messaging him, and again like why would
Speaker 3: he have right, Like if you don't, like, you wouldn't
Speaker 3: assume Trump God Emperor is someone referencing a video game.
Speaker 3: You just in this context, you just assume it's a
Speaker 3: crazy fascist.
Speaker 2: Right right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But about two months after that column came out,
Speaker 3: a writer with the Huffington Post, Nico Pitney, wrote an
Speaker 3: article about the growing Trump God Emperor meme phenomenon quote
Speaker 3: among Trump's active online supporters, the nickname is now commonplace.
Speaker 3: The post announcing Trump's participation in the Q and A
Speaker 3: heralded our God Emperor, and a search of the phrase
Speaker 3: returned over two hundred posts in the day after Trump's appearance.
Speaker 3: Some forum members say God Emperor is simply a tongue
Speaker 3: in cheek attempt to rile up Trump opponents who fear
Speaker 3: he would be a strong man as president. The term
Speaker 3: is attributed variously to God Emperor, characters in the science
Speaker 3: fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called Warhammer forty thousand.
Speaker 3: We know he can't literally be one, wrote member in
Speaker 3: New Jersey nine oh eight, but the phrase whip people
Speaker 3: into a frenzy saying that we literally want a dictator.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, okay. Funding that marketing back then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was nicer back then when they had to
Speaker 3: pretend it was a bit and I do lo well
Speaker 3: it could be Dune, Well, Dune, it could be, but
Speaker 3: it's not. Warhammer is kind of like a lot of
Speaker 3: Warhammer was originally ripping off Dune, and the Emperor characters
Speaker 3: based heavily on on Leo A. Trades Right, Like there's yeah,
Speaker 3: that's certainly like like Warhammer is essentially all of the
Speaker 3: sci fi that was bigg in the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 3: before getting put into a blender and like merged together
Speaker 3: right with.
Speaker 2: Thatch, right uk, Yeah.
Speaker 3: As we'll talk about yes, so like the journalist there
Speaker 3: is correct that like, yeah, I mean they could have been,
Speaker 3: but in this case they definitely weren't. They were talking
Speaker 3: about the Emperor from forty k Now, a big part
Speaker 3: of the appeal of the god Emperor character for these
Speaker 3: people is that he was explicitly in the lore of
Speaker 3: the game genocidal. The way the backstory goes, you know,
Speaker 3: Warmer forty thousand is set in the forty first millennium,
Speaker 3: like like thirty nine or zero thousand years into the future,
Speaker 3: but in the lore of the game, and like the
Speaker 3: year thirty thousand or so, about ten thousand years before
Speaker 3: the current day of the setting. The Emperor, while he
Speaker 3: was still alive and healthy, launched a great crusade after
Speaker 3: unifying Earth. You know, there had been a big space
Speaker 3: empire before, but it all crashed after the Ai, you know,
Speaker 3: went crazy and fucked everything up. So Earth was just
Speaker 3: like this warring mess of techno barbarians and shit. And
Speaker 3: the Emperor takes over. He unifies Earth, and he makes
Speaker 3: a bunch of gene modified super soldiers called space Marines,
Speaker 3: and he sends them out into the galaxy to commit
Speaker 3: mass genocide against all of the different alien species that
Speaker 3: he considered a threat in any human world. That wouldn't
Speaker 3: bend the need to him, right, They just do thousands
Speaker 3: of genocides out in the galaxy. They take over like
Speaker 3: a million worlds, and this all does end badly for
Speaker 3: the Emperor, like his sons, who were his main generals
Speaker 3: that he had created in a lab to eventually a
Speaker 3: bunch of them betray them and he's badly wounded and
Speaker 3: has to be on like this life support system forever
Speaker 3: and ever, which leads to the nightmare future that the
Speaker 3: game itself is set in. But the fact that like
Speaker 3: none of this works for the Emperor, and that again
Speaker 3: kinda in the lore, you're not supposed to be like, ah,
Speaker 3: the Emperor, what a good guy who was doing a
Speaker 3: good thing. You're supposed to be like, oh, he's just
Speaker 3: like wiping people out for no reason, Like he was
Speaker 3: just a real real dick. Yeah.
Speaker 2: People always like to say like, oh, it's you know,
Speaker 2: and nobody's good in the world of Warhammer Force, okay,
Speaker 2: which the other crue yes, but specifically the Imperium is horrible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely horrible. And in the books about this genocide,
Speaker 3: there's like moments where your favorite characters are wiping out
Speaker 3: a species and like the last members of the species
Speaker 3: will be like, we just wanted to be left alone,
Speaker 3: Like these are. They're not subtle, like the writers are
Speaker 3: not super subtle about them being the baddies.
Speaker 2: Say what you will about Warhammer forty k, but subtle
Speaker 2: is not one of them.
Speaker 3: Subtle is not something you can apply to this game. However,
Speaker 3: some people fail to see the broader message in the
Speaker 3: lore and just hone in on the things that appeal
Speaker 3: to them. And there's a great four Chan post I
Speaker 3: found from dis the I think July twenty first, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: where someone posts a picture and it's yet another one
Speaker 3: of those like photoshop things where you've got like Donald
Speaker 3: Trump in the place of a space marine. Year is
Speaker 3: now forty thousand. Trump turned out to be the God
Speaker 3: Emperor and initiated the imperium of man killing Xenos all day,
Speaker 3: every day in his honor. Life is good. Get like
Speaker 3: in the game, things aren't good in the forty first millennium.
Speaker 3: The Emperor's stuck in a life support chair and everyone
Speaker 3: worships him even though he was a major atheist, and
Speaker 3: everything's falling apart all the time. Life is not in
Speaker 3: fact good.
Speaker 2: And anywhere the space Marines came from is by design terrible.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, they're abducted child soldiers who are like genetically
Speaker 3: enhanced so they can go crack down on rebellions against
Speaker 3: the state. They're not like, it's not a like, it's
Speaker 3: like it's a fun game. There's a lot of like
Speaker 3: the lore is interesting and the models are cool, but
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to think, boy, I wish I lived
Speaker 3: in that world. That would be silly.
Speaker 2: Imagine if RFK Junior got the keys to the space
Speaker 2: marine program.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: He's already got a strategic stockpile of trend and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: butter ready to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's the first step towards having space marines.
Speaker 3: Should just let RFK cook up like whatever kind of
Speaker 3: like mammal penis based potion he can to invent the
Speaker 3: extra organs that make you a super soldier.
Speaker 2: Fuck, he's America's Firth, like a first neo apothecary.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. Yeah, he's the beginning of the
Speaker 3: techno barbarian tries. So the very first edition of Warhammer
Speaker 3: forty thousand, which was was called Warhammer forty thousand Rogue Trader.
Speaker 3: It was a tabletop wargame published first in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3: Before eighty seven, it's manufacturer Games Workshop published a wide
Speaker 3: array of board games and miniatures, most of which were
Speaker 3: focused around fantasy wargaming and role playing. Tabletop wargangs have
Speaker 3: a long history. The ancient Greeks were talking thousands of
Speaker 3: years ago, had a game called Patea where players would
Speaker 3: simulate FEALANX combat using game pieces and some sort of
Speaker 3: rules system. I don't think we actually have the rules,
Speaker 3: but I don't actually know that much about it. But
Speaker 3: they did have a dice.
Speaker 2: Did they need it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're kind of dice.
Speaker 1: We know.
Speaker 3: The Romans had d twenties, I mean theoretically, but yeah,
Speaker 3: and there was like it was for military training. It
Speaker 3: was to help people who are going to be like
Speaker 3: officers I think sometimes figure like learn the ropes and
Speaker 3: whatnot and learn to think strategically. The Romans, being Romans,
Speaker 3: plagiarized the Greeks and made their own wargames, which were
Speaker 3: similar but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess,
Speaker 3: which is a tabletop wargame, was created in India, and
Speaker 3: like the six hundreds, I think, and I think that
Speaker 3: the sixteen hundreds is when you start to get like
Speaker 3: modern chess. And by the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: people had started selling and marketing wargames with little lead soldiers,
Speaker 3: often simulating Napoleonic combat or like American Civil War combat.
Speaker 3: But this is when you start to get wargames that
Speaker 3: at least you could recognize at a glance as the
Speaker 3: same kind of thing as Warhammer, where you've got two
Speaker 3: dudes and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table,
Speaker 3: right like that, that's kind of when that comes into being.
Speaker 3: Games Workshop had been founded in nineteen seventy five by
Speaker 3: three friends who loved these first stirrings of nerd culture
Speaker 3: and wanted to make and sell games of their own.
Speaker 3: The first edition of Warkhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy,
Speaker 3: came out in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 3: Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf,
Speaker 3: that featured an Orc model carrying a banner with the
Speaker 3: face of Margaret Thatcher then the Prime Minister of the
Speaker 3: UK painted on it and the piece was labeled Maggie's
Speaker 3: Death Banner. And there's a show with PHO. It's fucking great. Yeah,
Speaker 3: first off, pretty good paint job like this. It's a credible,
Speaker 3: credibly painted Orc and that's just straight up Margaret Thatcher's
Speaker 3: face on a banner with like a severed hand on
Speaker 3: the top.
Speaker 2: It's great, that's good, And like the orc's understanding of
Speaker 2: technology is pretty much Margaret Thatcher's understanding of how economics work. Right, Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: if you privatize it a go fast though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Article for The Gamer, Ben Sledge writes.
Speaker 3: She later appeared she being Thatcher in the Evil Within
Speaker 3: a campaign for Warhammer Fantasy roleplay. The name of the
Speaker 3: campaign itself is a reference to one of Thatcher's speeches,
Speaker 3: where she infamously said we have always to be aware
Speaker 3: of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to
Speaker 3: fight and more dangerous to liberty. She was, of course,
Speaker 3: talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihood
Speaker 3: and lavelhoods in the face of countless mind closures under
Speaker 3: her regime. The Impress Margaretha also spelled Magreeta, is a
Speaker 3: clear satirical representation of Thatcher ascending to power in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy nine, the same year as the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so.
Speaker 3: Cool, it gets better. Ian mcgrecor leads an army of
Speaker 3: Orcs against Arca, Zarguls, Dwarfs who themselves are suffering miners.
Speaker 3: If those names aren't recognizable to you. Ian McGregor was
Speaker 3: responsible for shutting down Countless Minds under Thatcher's orders, and
Speaker 3: Arthur Scargill was the leader of the National Union of
Speaker 3: Mineworkers during the strikes in nineteen eighty four and nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty five, who later founded the Socialist Labour Party. So
Speaker 3: that's not subtle.
Speaker 2: We have to unionize the dwarves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, all dwarves are unionized, as are the sponsors
Speaker 3: for this podcast. Unless they're not, I have really no
Speaker 3: way of knowing. And we're back. So I think that
Speaker 3: has established politics and political satire was kind of embedded
Speaker 3: in the foundations of Warhammer from the beginning, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it was also more a thing in fantasy than
Speaker 3: forty K. As Sledge notes in his article after nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty seven, the people making Warhammer forty thousand, I think
Speaker 3: in part because forty k really started to take off
Speaker 3: and they were like, oh, this could actually be big.
Speaker 3: We probably shouldn't like make so many jokes about partisan
Speaker 3: politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game.
Speaker 2: Maybe we shouldn't put Margaret Thatcher's face a banner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably should have Maggie's face on as many banners.
Speaker 3: So they got a little more subtle with the politics,
Speaker 3: didn't disappear entirely, and you can always tell it was
Speaker 3: like punks making it in that period of time. The
Speaker 3: early years of forty k art and lore contained many
Speaker 3: references and allusions to aspects of punk culture. So today
Speaker 3: in the game, space marines are these gigantic much taller
Speaker 3: than people like monk, like like heroic warrior monks, right,
Speaker 3: and they're you know, they're all superhuman. They're the result
Speaker 3: of all of this genetic tinkering, and you know, they're
Speaker 3: incapable of fear, and they're these these kind of like
Speaker 3: idealized like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical like warrior, right,
Speaker 3: Like that that's everything a space marine is. That's not
Speaker 3: what they were at first. The first space marines were
Speaker 3: basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this
Speaker 3: brutal imperial that were there like crack down on dissent
Speaker 3: and stuff. There's a great from an early White Dwarf magazine.
Speaker 3: There's a piece of art that I'm showing Joe. Now
Speaker 3: that's like an early it's a drawing up. There's like
Speaker 3: a punk who's been spray painting marines out on a wall,
Speaker 3: and he's got his hands against the wall, and there's
Speaker 3: two space marines standing behind him. You know, they're not
Speaker 3: taller than him, because they weren't initially superhuman. They were
Speaker 3: just guys in armor. One of them's got what looks
Speaker 3: like a stun baton in his hands. And then there's
Speaker 3: text underneath it that says, when the eye of Terror blinks,
Speaker 3: ships fly between Lost Worlds and the rest of the galaxy.
Speaker 3: Miners ship their oars, and slavers play their loathsome trade
Speaker 3: where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark,
Speaker 3: bringing to the Lost Worlds the brutal order of the Imperium,
Speaker 3: if only for a few days. So there's space cops, right.
Speaker 2: Space marine cops flying through space so they could play
Speaker 2: candy crush and do nothing at a different location.
Speaker 3: Right. That's not the only way space marines were depicted,
Speaker 3: but they were often depicted as that, as like cops
Speaker 3: and bullies. They were nearly always thugs. They were not
Speaker 3: you know, they weren't like they looked cool but like
Speaker 3: their personalities were not cool, right, they weren't meant to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, went from being like a Warrior night to starting
Speaker 2: off as like Sully from Long Island.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, yeah, strong Sully vibes in these so again,
Speaker 3: even though after this point there's no more whole campaign
Speaker 3: settings created a mock like Union Busting and the like.
Speaker 3: The designers behind forty k were always pretty direct about
Speaker 3: the fact that the Imperium are not the good guys
Speaker 3: and the Emperor is not a great leader. In fact,
Speaker 3: here's how the first ever Warhammer forty thousand rule book opened.
Speaker 3: For more than one hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat
Speaker 3: immobile on the golden throne of Earth. He is the
Speaker 3: master of mankind by the will of the gods, and
Speaker 3: master of a million worlds by the might of his
Speaker 3: inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with
Speaker 3: power from the dark age of technology. He is the
Speaker 3: carrion Lord of the Imperium, to whom a thousand souls
Speaker 3: are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk
Speaker 3: and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh, the stuff
Speaker 3: of which the Imperium is made.
Speaker 2: Much more explicit. Now it's kind of couched in the
Speaker 2: pseudo religious terms that the entire Imperium exists as, but
Speaker 2: back that it was definitely very much you couldn't hide from, Like, no,
Speaker 2: this is an empire that runs on blood and death. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And there's you know, there's still that bit that
Speaker 3: intro goes on to include some of the texts that
Speaker 3: they have at the start of every game book now,
Speaker 3: and they always do make the point that like, this
Speaker 3: is a bad this is the worst possible regime, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they've been very consistent about that. But I love that
Speaker 3: bit at the start, right which you winted out, where
Speaker 3: they're like, the Iperium runs on the blood and flesh
Speaker 3: of human beings. It's a cannibalistic nightmare regime. Yep, nothing changes,
Speaker 3: nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in
Speaker 3: basically every book of rules and lare published by Games
Speaker 3: Workshop in the years since. Unfortunately, they didn't do that
Speaker 3: in a vacuum, and over the long years of the
Speaker 3: game has existed, they also expanded the lore behind the
Speaker 3: Space Marines and turned them into what they are today.
Speaker 3: And because the Space Marines are what sold the best
Speaker 3: and what looked the coolest. Most of like the especially
Speaker 3: the kids who were just getting into the hobby, got
Speaker 3: into the Space Marines were who they marketed and focused
Speaker 3: more and more of the game around. And there's a
Speaker 3: lot of different alien races and stuff in it, and
Speaker 3: obviously those had to become more monstrous to match, right,
Speaker 3: because that makes the space Marines look cooler and more heroic.
Speaker 3: And all of this led to a situation where a
Speaker 3: lot of players didn't realize really that the Imperium aren't
Speaker 3: the good guys and that Purge, the heretic and other
Speaker 3: Imperial catchphrases shouldn't be seen as admirable. But again, space
Speaker 3: Marines look really, really cool, and Warhammer players and writers
Speaker 3: have created so much fiction and fan out over the
Speaker 3: years that a lot of people have made that aesthetic
Speaker 3: a real part of their lives, and this has happened
Speaker 3: in some pretty extreme cases. Probably the most extreme example
Speaker 3: of this would be the fact that if you watch
Speaker 3: enough videos put out by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense,
Speaker 3: or just a ton of combat footage from the War
Speaker 3: in Ukraine where you can see a lot of Ukrainian soldiers,
Speaker 3: you'll inevitably run across dudes with decorations in their armor
Speaker 3: or gear that look like this, And Joe, you're seeing
Speaker 3: this now, but this is essentially a I mean it's
Speaker 3: it's a wax like stamp with some papers underneath it
Speaker 3: that's adhering it to the arm.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've seen some, but I haven't seen this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, these are in in the game, these like
Speaker 3: wack papers adhered to like armor by these like wax seals.
Speaker 3: It's called an oath of moment, right, or purity seals too.
Speaker 3: Like there's two different kinds of things that both sort
Speaker 3: of you know involve there being like papers attached to it,
Speaker 3: but like these are things like the oath of moment
Speaker 3: is like before battle, Marie space Rins like write down
Speaker 3: like what their goal is for this fight, or like
Speaker 3: make a vow that like this, you know, the enemy
Speaker 3: won't pass this point or something, and then they'll like
Speaker 3: adhere that to their armor to like hold them to it. Right,
Speaker 3: And you know this was like they started putting these
Speaker 3: on the armor of the models, these like little bitty
Speaker 3: like you could see these like scraps of paper adhered
Speaker 3: by like wax seals. Because they made the power armor.
Speaker 3: The Space Marines had look have more of like a
Speaker 3: medieval night vibe, and that's a big part of like
Speaker 3: the forty k aesthetic is you have like a lot
Speaker 3: of these medieval like weapons and armor, but it's also
Speaker 3: like futuristic. That's a big part of like the appeal
Speaker 3: of the aesthetic of the setting, and it appealed to
Speaker 3: people so much, and there's so many fans of Warhammer
Speaker 3: in Ukraine that, like one a lot of young Ukrainian
Speaker 3: men started going into battle, they started putting purity seals
Speaker 3: on their armor, like to the extent that like now
Speaker 3: people make and sell period like seals that you can
Speaker 3: put on your gear.
Speaker 2: Right, I've seen like detachments named after like Space Marine
Speaker 2: stuff as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like it's it's it's fucking wild. And there's
Speaker 3: even like if you look down there, there's another example
Speaker 3: of one on a guy's armor with a bunch of
Speaker 3: like Warhammer patches on his body.
Speaker 2: Eye. Yeah, yeah, it's nothing but Warhammer stuff, going from
Speaker 2: nothing but Warhammer's Stanicus more, Space Marines got an Imperial
Speaker 2: Guard one from the the Death Watch of Greek Yep
Speaker 2: or the Death Corps Cree. Sorry.
Speaker 3: Well in that picture that you're looking at, Joe came
Speaker 3: from a two year old post in the Warhammer forty
Speaker 3: k subreddit that read greetings from Ukraine. Yeah, this has
Speaker 3: become really popular here because many of the military are
Speaker 3: Warhammer fans. So many of the volunteers who helped the
Speaker 3: military try and find merchandise or patches of this type
Speaker 3: for them as a nice gift, right hmm. It's and
Speaker 3: I'm not, by the way, like we're talking about this
Speaker 3: in the context of people taking Warhammer the right way
Speaker 3: or the wrong way. I don't have any issue with this.
Speaker 3: Like you're fighting a fucking desperate war for your survival.
Speaker 3: Do whatever you want to your your armor. You know
Speaker 3: that makes you feel better. It's just it's weird. It's
Speaker 3: it was strange to see like this actually making its
Speaker 3: way to a real war because so many of the
Speaker 3: people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like,
Speaker 3: that's just a strange moment for the hobby. And you
Speaker 3: can for a comparison to how much this has jumped
Speaker 3: into mainstream like consciousness. When I was in the military,
Speaker 3: we had stupid like we call them morale patches. We
Speaker 3: had super little morale patches too. I never saw forty
Speaker 3: k one and I mean this is back in the
Speaker 3: early two times got up until the twenty Yeah, never
Speaker 3: saw anything never and so within a decade it's just
Speaker 3: like no, there's detachments themed after space marine groups. There's
Speaker 3: moral patches like it's having a moment, that's for sure.
Speaker 3: It's having a moment, and it's gonna get weirder, Joe,
Speaker 3: because I got another thing to show you, Oh boy.
Speaker 3: Every year, the firearms industry gathers in Las Vegas, Nevada
Speaker 3: for the Shot Show. It is the gun industry trade
Speaker 3: show where different companies show off new weapons, both firearms
Speaker 3: that are thing meant for civilian use and for police
Speaker 3: and for the military. And one big trend, as I'm
Speaker 3: sure you know, Joe, in military arms design over the
Speaker 3: last couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the
Speaker 3: last ten or fifteen years, have been small portable semi
Speaker 3: automatic and automatic grenade launchers in many cases, ones that
Speaker 3: can fire like smart grenades. Right, we have a degree
Speaker 3: of control and like when it detonates, how far it
Speaker 3: has to go? Right, Like that's a big it's like
Speaker 3: a major area in which weapons have like weapons development
Speaker 3: has leapt forward over the course of the last like
Speaker 3: twenty something years in this regard, you have a lot
Speaker 3: more options there then you used to for grenade launchers
Speaker 3: of that type. And periodically, you know, as some of
Speaker 3: these different products that are like because the main weapon
Speaker 3: that a space marine carries is called a bolterer, and
Speaker 3: it's this big, cool looking rifle that's actually not like
Speaker 3: a rifle at all. It fires basically like a rocket
Speaker 3: munition that one charge shoots the munition out the barrel
Speaker 3: and then a secondary charge actually ignites the rocket and
Speaker 3: then the rocket will like shoot towards its target and
Speaker 3: blow up.
Speaker 2: And you know, they're.
Speaker 3: Huge guns meant for future terrifying post human war. And periodically,
Speaker 3: when you'd see one of these new automatic grenade launchers,
Speaker 3: people online would be like, Oh, that looks like a bolterer.
Speaker 3: We're finally making real bolters, right, because that's kind of
Speaker 3: what they look like. And this year at shot Show, Barrett,
Speaker 3: which is a company that makes very fucking big guns,
Speaker 3: brought a semi autogmatic grenade launcher painted in ultramarines blue
Speaker 3: with a fucking an oath of moment attached.
Speaker 2: To the barrel.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, hey everyone here. The maker of that thirty
Speaker 3: milimeter grenade launcher was actually Mars Ink, not Barrett. I
Speaker 3: made the mistake because both Mars and Barrett are making
Speaker 3: basically identical thirty milimeter grenade launchers and competing to get
Speaker 3: a contract from the US military for this program called
Speaker 3: the SSRs system, and both had models of the SSRs
Speaker 3: on display at shot Show. But it was Mars Inc.
Speaker 3: That painted THEIRS up to look like a Bolterer and
Speaker 3: put a purity seal on it. Thank you.
Speaker 2: I have to wonder what Games Workshop feels about this.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, that's just it. That's just a Bolterer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Ultra mariines blue and everything on there, like it's
Speaker 3: fucking wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So whether or not you think that's cool depends on
Speaker 3: your attitude towards the arms industry. Again, you can think
Speaker 3: about that however you want, but it represents a kind
Speaker 3: of awkward problem for Games Workshop. The fact that stuff
Speaker 3: like this is happening is evidence of the insane degree
Speaker 3: of cultural penetration that Warhammer has achieved. But having real
Speaker 3: weapons made in the image of your video game or
Speaker 3: of your game weapons can be problematic too, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't want to be connected to someone being
Speaker 2: actually murdered by your product.
Speaker 3: Right right, like that that can be a problem. And
Speaker 3: speaking of things that are problematic, the sponsors of this show,
Speaker 3: we're back. So, as I kind of brought up before
Speaker 3: we went to break, the wide popularity of Warhammer has
Speaker 3: increasingly forced problematic confrontations both between sort of how much
Speaker 3: people like it and how many many things they want
Speaker 3: to stick Warhammer on and what the company Games Workshop
Speaker 3: may what Warhammer's stuck on, and between like groups of
Speaker 3: fans themselves. And about four years ago, Spain's largest Warhammer
Speaker 3: tournament let a guy play while wearing Nazi paraphernalia, and
Speaker 3: I believe his army was kind of like Nazi themed too,
Speaker 3: Like it was like a Wehrmacht themed guard army or
Speaker 3: something if I'm remembering correct, But he was like wearing
Speaker 3: Nazi shit, and he'd entered the tournament under the name
Speaker 3: Austrian painter, Like really fucking subtle, my dude, And people
Speaker 3: weren't thrilled about this. I'm going to quote from an
Speaker 3: article in Polygon. Gt Telavera tournament organizers gave comment to
Speaker 3: tabletop wargaming site spiky Bit, stating that the club repudiates
Speaker 3: the Nazi mentality in all its aspects. Nazi ideas have
Speaker 3: no place in our group because they are contrary to
Speaker 3: everything we stand for. The organizer said that the player
Speaker 3: said he would not leave us unless they involve the police,
Speaker 3: As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain. The
Speaker 3: organizers hesitated let this bring legal trouble upon their club.
Speaker 2: And I don't know.
Speaker 3: Enough about the situation to know, like, where these guys
Speaker 3: really just backed into a completely fucked corner and having
Speaker 3: a lot of options, should that Probably I'm going to
Speaker 3: guess they could have and should have done more, But
Speaker 3: I don't really know much about that. What I do
Speaker 3: know is that this causes a lot of people to
Speaker 3: get pissed off online, and it blows up enough that
Speaker 3: Games Workshop has to publish an announcement on November nineteenth,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. The Imperium is driven by hate, Warhammer
Speaker 3: is not. And in this announcement there's a couple of
Speaker 3: interesting lines. First off, they're pointing out that, like, look,
Speaker 3: the imperium of Man is a cautionary table. Like so
Speaker 3: many aspects of Warmer forty thousand, it is satirical. They
Speaker 3: go through the definition of what satire is right, Like,
Speaker 3: that's literally in this little article that they put up,
Speaker 3: and then they note that said certain real world hate groups,
Speaker 3: in adherence to historical ideologies better left in the past,
Speaker 3: sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment
Speaker 3: and co op them for their own agendas. We've said
Speaker 3: it before, but a reminder about what we believe in.
Speaker 3: We believe in and support a community united by shared
Speaker 3: values of mutual kindness and respect. Our fantasy settings are
Speaker 3: grim and dark, but that is not a reflection of
Speaker 3: who we are or how we feel the real world
Speaker 3: should be. We will never accept nor condone any form
Speaker 3: of prejudice, hatred, or abuse in our company or in
Speaker 3: the Warhammer hobby. And then they basically they straight out say,
Speaker 3: if you come to a games workshop of nter store
Speaker 3: and where symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you
Speaker 3: to leave if we don't want your money.
Speaker 2: Some things don't need to be said aloud until they do,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. Yeah, it's it's an implication,
Speaker 2: and to be fair, in most places in Europe this
Speaker 2: would have been against the law. Spain, however, is different
Speaker 2: for different reasons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's that c STA vibe. You know, sometimes
Speaker 3: it applies a little further than it ought to. And
Speaker 3: I want to note too, to be fair, I don't
Speaker 3: want it to seem like because as you noted, like
Speaker 3: this isn't the thing you have to say until you do.
Speaker 3: There's some valid critiques that there were other things that
Speaker 3: cropped up for a few years prior to this, that
Speaker 3: Games Worships should have made a statement earlier. I'm certainly
Speaker 3: not saying they shouldn't have. We may dig into some
Speaker 3: of that, you know, later as the podcast goes on,
Speaker 3: but like, they haven't handled this perfectly, but that's a
Speaker 3: pretty good message, right that, like we don't want your money,
Speaker 3: we don't want you in the hobby. And it's good
Speaker 3: that they did say something eventually, right, you know, this
Speaker 3: is a publicly traded corporation. They're not they're not a
Speaker 3: culture warrior and they're not an activist. Yeah, but like,
Speaker 3: I'm glad that something got fucking said, and they've That's
Speaker 3: not the only thing they've done in the last couple
Speaker 3: of years. There's been some more subtle and some less
Speaker 3: subtle moves. You know, one thing that happened recently, So
Speaker 3: for years, a lot of fans have asked for, like
Speaker 3: as the get because as Warhammer's got more popular, more
Speaker 3: women have played, and they've added in more female models
Speaker 3: for different like sides and stuff. There's more female guardsmen
Speaker 3: than there used to be, more female elder and you know,
Speaker 3: they've they've at least and the Sisters of Battle, which
Speaker 3: is an all female line, has gotten like a refresh
Speaker 3: line and a lot more attention. You know, they've done
Speaker 3: this a few ways. But a lot of people want
Speaker 3: there to be female space marines and this is kind
Speaker 3: of a you know, still a topic of a lot
Speaker 3: of debate within the actual lore itself. The Emperor like
Speaker 3: they can only be male because of how the Emperor
Speaker 3: designed their gene seed and stuff. And the real reason
Speaker 3: for this, obviously is that like nobody thought about it
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty seven, that like they would want there
Speaker 3: to be like the female models for space. They were
Speaker 3: thinking about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: And it would hardly be the first bit of lore
Speaker 2: that was retcon, like, right, like the Tapestry of Warhammer
Speaker 2: Law is a series of retconnings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that said, I also do kind of one
Speaker 3: thing that I appreciate is in some of the more
Speaker 3: recent lore when they've gone back to like talk like
Speaker 3: feature have books that feature the Emperor and talk about
Speaker 3: the creation of the space Marines. One way they've kind
Speaker 3: of retcon things is because there's a conversation between the
Speaker 3: Emperor and one of his top advisors who's like, I thought,
Speaker 3: you should have made all the primarks, you know, your
Speaker 3: sons that were the leaders of these legions women, Like
Speaker 3: they should have all been girls, like they're leaders in
Speaker 3: the space because we would have had less problems. They
Speaker 3: wouldn't have all wound up going to fucking war with you.
Speaker 3: They would have been less annoying. And I kind of
Speaker 3: do like the idea that all space Marines are men
Speaker 3: because the Emperor is just kind of a misogynist, like,
Speaker 3: and it led up destroying him, right the fact that
Speaker 3: he yeah, it kind of does like it sort of works.
Speaker 3: But one thing MS Workship did do recently is they
Speaker 3: introduced the Emperor's body guard or these other group of
Speaker 3: fucking future super soldiers, the custodes who or the castode
Speaker 3: is whatever it fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use.
Speaker 3: And they've been adding like female sculpts, like female heads
Speaker 3: and stuff you don't really tell with the faces. But
Speaker 3: a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll
Speaker 3: tell you that right now. The most I'm so surprised
Speaker 3: by this crazy over this shit.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And it's it's very funny because you'll see them posting
Speaker 3: stuff like, you know, if you just want to play
Speaker 3: the hobby, play the hobby, but don't come into my
Speaker 3: culture and try to like change it, because like you
Speaker 3: want to you want there to be blue haired you know,
Speaker 3: girls in your in my fucking game and my culture. Yeah,
Speaker 3: a lot of these guys being like, oh, this is
Speaker 3: going to destroy the hobby, Like this is like once
Speaker 3: woke gets in, it ruins everything. Fucking Warhammer has never
Speaker 3: been worth more money, Like Games Workshop is one of
Speaker 3: the most valuable corporations in the entire United Kingdom. Fucking
Speaker 3: little plastic models of space marines and or and shit
Speaker 3: are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And
Speaker 3: it's an island.
Speaker 2: I can play these weird space monsters like Tyrannids or orcs,
Speaker 2: and but you know when when you add women to
Speaker 2: the mix, really ruining the immersion. What's the most unbelievable.
Speaker 3: I can't believe it.
Speaker 2: Fucking fucking insane man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's very silly, and you know, at at
Speaker 3: its core this is a culture war centered over a
Speaker 3: very important problem for creatives, though, which is that, like
Speaker 3: when you're creating fictional fascist organizations, whether they are impossibly
Speaker 3: advanced sci fi empires or like a cult of deranged
Speaker 3: post apocalyptic bikers, there's a risk that you're gonna make
Speaker 3: that some of the fans of your work will be
Speaker 3: fans of those fictional fascists, and not in a I
Speaker 3: just think they look cool way, but in a I
Speaker 3: have some opinions about you know, this racial group way right,
Speaker 3: and real fascists, as we noticed, spent decades getting really
Speaker 3: good at using stuff like that as a bridge to
Speaker 3: start propagandizing to young people. Whether we like it or not,
Speaker 3: fictional worlds are battlegrounds and the broader culture war against
Speaker 3: ascendant fascist sentiment worldwide. Fabrizio Galley, the creator of that
Speaker 3: God Emperor Trump float that we started this episode discussing,
Speaker 3: said something similar in an interview that I read on
Speaker 3: heavy dot com. The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and of
Speaker 3: old and worn culture is over. We have entered the
Speaker 3: era of fantasy video games and virtual life. Yeah, right
Speaker 3: on the nose there, twenty nineteen. But bang hit the target.
Speaker 2: I hate when you read something from now several years ago. Yep,
Speaker 2: that's just everything now, yeah that is that is just everything.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's just everything. Well, Joe, I think that's all
Speaker 3: I've got here. You know, how are you feeling?
Speaker 2: I'm feeling good, Robert. And I hate to say it, yeah,
Speaker 2: because I love talking about Warhammer, and I love talking
Speaker 2: about to talk about Warhammer, and I love the weird
Speaker 2: shit that comes out of it, especially hearing stuff like this,
Speaker 2: because I don't want people to like this to be
Speaker 2: the first introduction to Warhamer, like, oh wow, it's populated
Speaker 2: by fascists.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I go to a local Warhammer club where I live.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to dox it, but it is full
Speaker 2: of incredibly lovely people and probably one of the most
Speaker 2: diverse rooms I've ever been in in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yeah, it's good that we can close up
Speaker 3: talking about stuff like this because as conservative a weirdo
Speaker 3: as I was as a kid, I really do think
Speaker 3: playing Warhammer was one of like the healthier things for
Speaker 3: me in terms of connecting me to other people who
Speaker 3: believed different things, like even within the context of like
Speaker 3: a fucking gaming group at a hobby store in the
Speaker 3: early two thousands, Like I remember after the invasion of Iraq,
Speaker 3: like a few weeks or months after, like my friends
Speaker 3: and I, like, somebody brought in like a print out
Speaker 3: of like a missile strike on I think it was
Speaker 3: a BMP on like an Iraqi troop train. You could
Speaker 3: see frame by frame this thing blowing up like people
Speaker 3: inside it, and we're fucking shitty tech kids in Texas
Speaker 3: being like, whoa Like, look, I'd never seen anything like that.
Speaker 3: And one of the guys we gamed with was like
Speaker 3: a veteran who'd been like a tanker. I think he
Speaker 3: had fought in Desert Storm and was not like I
Speaker 3: had always assumed it was a pretty conservative guy and
Speaker 3: was not like the most like was a man in
Speaker 3: his like his forties or fifties who would yell at
Speaker 3: children over the rules of a video or of a
Speaker 3: tabletop game. Oh yeah, like that kind of dude. But
Speaker 3: also when he saw what we were doing and he
Speaker 3: realized what it was a picture of, he was like,
Speaker 3: don't do that, Like there were people in there. You
Speaker 3: don't laugh at something like that, you know, like it's
Speaker 3: not cool. It's not something to like go like whoa over,
Speaker 3: Like it's not a game, like like it's the most
Speaker 3: terrifying thing you can possibly imagine, and you need to
Speaker 3: have more respect and as like a fucking twelve year
Speaker 3: old little piece of shit like that actually like hit
Speaker 3: and impacted me, and I was like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: was kind of if, like, fucking this guy is calling
Speaker 3: me out for being a dick. I might have been
Speaker 3: being a dick.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, he's dressed head to toe an Imperial Guard cosplay
Speaker 2: like he should.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Hey man, death isn't funny covered in I had
Speaker 3: to tell all right, Joe, you want to plug your
Speaker 3: book before we roll out here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I am the host of the history podcast
Speaker 2: The Lines led by Donkeys. So if you like military history,
Speaker 2: check us out. And my first gunpowder fantasy novel, The
Speaker 2: Highlands Burned, comes out May ninth, and you can digitally
Speaker 2: pre order it now, so uh check that out. Reviews
Speaker 2: are coming in. They're very positive and I'm really excited
Speaker 2: for it to release.
Speaker 3: Excellent. I am very excited to read it and excited
Speaker 3: for our listeners to read it. And also Joe I'm
Speaker 3: excited for you and I to have a podcast about Warhammer.
Speaker 3: When's it coming out? Neither of us know. Helly, there's
Speaker 3: gonna be a little bit of a delay, like we're
Speaker 3: currently dealing with. You know, there's a lot of logistical issues,
Speaker 3: including like just bringing you on and signing contracts because
Speaker 3: you're in a different country and stuff. We'll figure it out.
Speaker 3: There will be a podcast and it'll be a weekly show.
Speaker 3: It'll come out at some point this year. We just
Speaker 3: don't know exactly when yet. But we wanted to tease
Speaker 3: the idea for all of you and show you kind
Speaker 3: of what we've got coming down the pipe because we
Speaker 3: both kind of tease this online and social media a
Speaker 3: couple times, and I felt like bad about not putting something.
Speaker 2: Out people had noticed people had.
Speaker 3: So we'll be getting you. You know, we'll have more
Speaker 3: coming out soon. The show will be usually forty minute
Speaker 3: to an hour long episodes. We'll be covering you know,
Speaker 3: history and the lore in game. We'll be covering like
Speaker 3: real world reporting on different controversies around the game. You
Speaker 3: have a great pitch for that, based on another one
Speaker 3: of these like weird political culture war things that hits
Speaker 3: like a convention where people are like playing gaming and
Speaker 3: doing like painting contests and how the community deals with it.
Speaker 3: So we'll be talking about like both real life, how
Speaker 3: this this hobby is influencing and has been influenced by
Speaker 3: the shit going on in the world, and we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about just the nerdy shit that we love.
Speaker 3: Like I'm looking forward to putting together a painfully detailed
Speaker 3: history of like the concept of a space marine in
Speaker 3: sci fi fiction and how that's led us to like
Speaker 3: games workshop building an empire. Yes, yeah, and yeah, Like
Speaker 3: what are you most excited to talk about.
Speaker 2: I'm incredibly excited to talk about and explain how the
Speaker 2: Imperial Guard works to people and how and how they
Speaker 2: die by the tens of millions.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well that's all for today, folks. We'll be back later,
Speaker 3: I mean, at some point.
Speaker 2: With a show.
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