A Geek History of Time - Episode 230 - Primarch Sources Part II

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Okay, so there's there there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're you're bringing up a term that I have never earned before. The the other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before, but it involves a language that uses pronunciation that's different from Latin it, and so you have no idea how to say it properly. And intensely 80s post apocalyptic schlock film. Oh, and schlong film. You know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers. Oh, okay.

So, so the resident Catholic thinking about that we're going for low earth orbit there is no rational here. Leave it on me after and you know I will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. I am. I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. No which I don't know if that's better. I mean you guys are Catholics you tell me. I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about that basically just means that I can show up and get fed. This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect Canergarie to the real world.

My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history and English teacher at the middle school level here in Northern California. And as long time listeners may know, we tend to record this podcast in the evenings. And our recording of this particular episode was just delayed slightly because I got a text message from my wife who had already gone to bed that I needed to come help her because we had forgotten to put the cover on our above ground pool after our son had been and my wife, the two of them had been in the pool this afternoon.

And so I got to go outside and take care of that. This is only primarily noteworthy because I never thought I would be the kind of person who ever had to put a cover over a pool. But having kids does strange things to you and here we are. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmonia. I am a high school US history teacher up here in Northern California. And I am the beneficiary of a friend moving and deciding he needed to downsize from a game he

no longer plays. I basically in one trip doubled my X-wings. So all the miniatures that I have for X-wing have now doubled and increased in diversity. The problem is that I don't have the space for it and my office has kind of become a bit of a mess. It is amongst the chores that I have set for myself for the summer and is the filing because I haven't filed anything in two years.

It's just a big old stack, I can go through it. Another is, it's only I had a podcast to listen to. Yeah, while you did that, yeah. But I recommend a couple. Officers with Dr. C's, a pretty good one. Yeah, yeah, I've heard, Face Palm America is actually pretty good. Yeah, office hours with Dr. C's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. I've heard face palm America is actually pretty good. Okay. All right. Yeah. There you go. Is is good stuff. But um, but yeah, I have a whole lot of filing to do and then after that, I have a whole lot of kind of restructuring. Um, and at the beginning of the summer, I had my kids

doing the same thing in their rooms. So as the short, short, short woman said in Poltergeist, this house is clean except for my office. So nice. I'm sitting amongst James Taylor's song, I guess, you know, like fine machines and flying machines and pieces on the ground. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I look forward to using Deep Cut, by the way. Thank you. But I look forward to using them in my Star Wars game for the kids, because I figured out how to use miniatures in the West End games Star Wars game.

And so that'll be cool. Very cool. Yeah. So that's what I got going on. Very cool. When last we spoke, you would just gotten into the third edition of Warhammer 40k. We discussed in fact that there was a colloquially termed Warhammer 30k as well as Warhammer 5k

where you dress up as your favorite tyranny and you chant blood for the blood gods as you run and pass down town. Okay, yeah, I think I'm remembering properly. Yeah. And it's not, it just needs to be a thing. Like a friendly local gaming store needs to set up a more humorous way. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta talk to the folks that great escape

here in Sacramento and be like, have I got an idea for you? Sure. Ah. here in Sacramento, I'd be like, have I got an idea for you? Sure. We just have to run it past the licensing people in Nottingham. I'd say skip over to the Nottingham people because to them, they measure things not in Imperial units anyway.

That's true. So you just be like a Warhammer 5K, fellas. Like, let's raise money. Like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's so crazy. It might actually work.

But yes, so when we left off, I had just finished going through the, the kind of the Warhammer 40K version of, between the time when the ocean's drank Atlantis and the rise of the Warhammer 40K version of between the time when the ocean is drank at Lantis and the rise of the Sun to various, which is a Conan reference for anybody who hasn't listened to those episodes. And in the game, in 1993, again, we have the status quo within the setting is that this is the state of the galaxy, right? And the way the galaxy got this way is starting to be written down. We're starting, we are now codifying the history of the galaxy of Warhammer 40,000. And it's worth noting that the history I just gave you is taken from the fifth edition rule book for Warhammer 40,000. In the fourth edition rule book, there is no,

the rule book does not go into the details of the history of the setting. Depending on the edition of the game, this information sometimes is in the basic rule book. Sometimes if you're a new player, you get like your factions understanding of the history of the galaxy when you get your army book, which in Warhammer 40K is referred to as a codex. So codex space wolves talks about the lemon rust and the conquest of Fenry and the exploits of the space wolves. Yeah. Yeah. The, you know, the Necron codex goes all the way back into the, you know, birth of the universe and the old ones and the star gods, you know, millions and millions and millions of years before the birth of humanity. You know, every, every faction book is written from the point of view of that faction. So if you're somebody who plays multiple factions, hi, like me, one of the wonderful things about the game is that you get this, you get a very

clear indication of very little in this universe is cut and dried as this is the factual truth. You know, everybody has their viewpoints on everything. And what I like about that is it's similar to Matt Foreback's Brave New World in that most of the lore is presented to you as a factional kind of thing. It's when he made this like back in 99 or so. So it's when the internet was nascent and everything looks like a website. And you have snuck into the dark web as it were when you're

checking things out. Or it's a brochure from the Delta Prime group. Or it's a bargainer who's telling you about how Houdini got his powers, um, you know, and stuff like that. It's really cool. The difference is that there is some layer of third-person omnipotence when it comes to the lore as well. It'll step in, do that for a while, and then step out, and say, okay, well, you know, when you do do do do do do do. Yeah, sounds like like that third person omnipotence is largely absent from this game. What what stands in for the third person omnipotence is you have the section of the rule book that is the army list and the rules for your army.

And that establishes the okay, like this is what makes this faction different from the other factions. Sure. There's a machine need to know if you just want to skip the Lauren get to the game. Yeah. You know, when the, I don't remember where I want to say it was this, it was either six or seventh edition. No, it was the sixth edition rule book.

The night that the sixth edition rule book was going to be released. My buddy Nick and I were part of the crowd of seething, sweating geeks waiting until midnight on Friday night because the game's really state was Saturday. So you couldn't get your book until 12 o'clock at 1 a.m. And everybody knew that Sixth Edition was going to be a big deal. It was going to be a big change in the rules. What all? And so this is back, obviously, before I met my wife, when I didn't have responsibilities to keep me grounded in the real world. And so it was in a game store at midnight on a Friday.

But anyway, Nick and I were in the store waiting waiting for the book to come out. And we got we got our rule books. And I immediately flipped past all of the rules, flipped straight past all of them. And I went straight to, okay, what are there, are there any new details? Is there any new, you know, how are they going to tell this story out of the lore in this rulebook? What are they going to cover? What aren't they, you know, and I immediately went to all the faction lore stuff and the basic rulebook. And I started looking through all that stuff and looking into the artwork and all that. And Nick immediately opened it right up to the rules list. And he laughed. And he said, see, you are like, forget about your rules. I want my lore. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever,

fluff, lore, I don't give a shit. With rules, give me rules. I want to know. Like, you know, and so you can approach it from either one of those two kind of directions. But in all of these additions, or in third addition, then in fourth and then in fifths, this time goes on, The basic kind of guidelines of this is what 40K is, have some things that remain constant. Okay. First of all, to kind of go back to talking about the horse, the story of the horse heresy. Obviously, there's huge thefts from Dune and the book of Revelation in the Bible, the war in heaven, the story in Revelation about where we get the concept of fallen angels from, like the space marines are referred to as the Emperor's Angels of Death. And so they turned on each other, and it is in the setting. It is referred to by people who know about it as the war in heaven. And there's also this unconscious kind of imperialist narrative, where we have the primarchs scattered out to all of the different worlds,

where they were seed to places. Well, and they all land on these different worlds, and they wind up becoming better at their home cultures than the native humans of each world. Very Tarzan. Well, it's very Tarzan. It's very the trope, as it's at least last time I looked it up, the trope on TV tropes is referred to as mighty whitey. Oh, not to be confused with where white people show up in BVDs.

It's called mighty tidy whitey. Yeah, mighty tidy whitey. Yeah. And when we talked about movies that have an aged well, the theme that you brought up was, I have multiple cases of white people being better at being indigenous, that indigenous people, there's that going on there. I always military white people too.

Yeah, and in the case, in the case the primarchs, they were designed to be not merely super soldiers, but super soldier super generals, right? Who are also capable of, you know, great depth of learning and philosophy and all of this other stuff, because they're just, they have been created to be superior, which also rubs up against some kind of supremacist ideas. Now the cultures that they wind up becoming part of and even the appearances of the prime all white, but the tropes, the tropes, some problematic stuff. Yeah.

I mean, you know, the present, well, as of this recording, the present prime minister of England is not white. Yeah. And yet he is decidedly a British imperialist. is decidedly a British imperialist. Yes, I mean, just financially so. Yeah. And it's, and yeah. Like it doesn't, you don't have to be white, but it doesn't hurt. Yeah, you know, yeah.

Sadly, yeah. And so as a, as one of the constants within, within the setting technology from the 31st millennium to the 41st millennium, as of 30th edition and remaining that way through as a through line, technology has remained stagnant for 10,000 years. The space marines of the Horus Heresy fought one another with bolt guns. They are still fighting one another with bolt guns. The holy bolter is still the signature weapon of the Adeptus Astartis. Well, that sounds riveting.

Nice. Thank you. Not even mad. You know, that's weld on I Now I'm starting to get pissed Heated even But but within girder your loins for the next one nice See back to not even mad

But within within the setting a bolt gun is like a gyro jet weapon, the it fires self propelled projectiles that are piercing explosive and all this. I mean, it's again, bombastic way over the top rule of cool super ultra cool shit. Yeah. What if an A10 had it was a handgun? Yeah, basically, yeah, kind of. But it is still awfully primitive because it's a projectile weapon that goes bang in a universe in which humanity had achieved these great technological advancements. And now the cream of the crop, the elite killers of humanity's military forces are using chemical, slug thrower, essentially kind of weapons. Right. So it's like it's high tech, but it's also oddly brutal and low tech at the same time. The adeptus titanicus, the Titan legions, who pilot these 30 story tall giant war machines that are referred to as God machines.

They have these incredibly powerful energy weapons that can level whole city blocks, but those machines are 10,000 years old. They have been around since the Horus Heresy. And there's, and there's, you can get into kind of a ship of Thesius question about, you know, is this the same, you know, heightened in parrots class, heightened as, as it was 10,000 years ago, but still, you know, within, within the mindset of the people in the setting, it is this ancient relic of the holy past, right? And so because of this part of the setting, your marine models could be fighting a battle

in the present, in year 999 of Millennium 41, or they could be fighting in Millennium 36 or Millennium 37. The tech would stay the same. The tech has been the same for 10,000 years. Right. And there's an unwritten understanding that your tabletop is your own version of the galaxy and you can be fighting any one of countless wars throughout the age of Imperium.

Okay. Um, now Xenos armies, which is the Imperium's term for aliens, Xenos, are usually appended with the word filthy in front of it. Filthy Xenos. Xenos armies are a thing, orcs, Eldar, Necrons, Tyrannids, they all get their own lore, like I mentioned before, and they all have roles in the story of the galaxy. Like for example, the calming of the warp storms that led to the great crusade being launched happened because the elder fucked up and created slun-ish.

That's like one example. And when I say fucked up, I actually mean literally fucked up. We got to excess after all. And I mean, that's kind of the biggest example, but, you know, the depth and intricacy of this history is interwoven through all of these codices. So if you're somebody who like me, by the way, I say codices,

because that's the technically correct form of the plural within 40k, they are referred to as codexes, which would like up until a couple of editions ago. Anyway, it's pet peeve of mine. But anyway, in order to get a full picture of the history of the galaxy, you would have to read, so if you're a lore horror like me, you would have to read multiple army books. Even if you don't play the army, like, no, I want to find out, like, you know, the Eldar, you know, the history of the Eldar and the history of the Necrons, for example, are intertwined. Because you come to find out, if you read about it, that the elder were created by the old ones to fight the Necrons. In an ancient war that happened a million years before humanity evolved. Like when our earliest ancestors were still lemurs,

the LDR were fighting a war against the Necrons. Okay. You know, that lasted for multiple millelef for eons. Right. Um, and so like there's this immense intricacy and all of the factions all have their own viewpoint and their own role, but the space marines and the conflict of the Horus Heresy, the space marines have always remained the poster boys for the game. And over time, the Horus Heresy and that particular narrative became more

and more kind of central to the character of the universe. And part of that is because one of the major most popular factions is first off space marines are part of the most popular faction because that's usually what everybody gets into the game and plays first. Mechanically, it's, you know, because space marines are relatively undemanding to play. There's, you don't... The human fighter basically. Yeah, you don't have to have a lot of tactical genius or finesse in order to do okay playing ruins. They're forgiving army. Eldar are depending on how you build them.

Classically Eldar are kind of a speed kills army. You need to pay attention to mobility. You need to pick your targets really carefully. And if you fuck something up, you're going to get wrecked. Because they move really fast. They hit really hard, but they're fragile. They're like eggshells on my hands. Yeah. Yeah.

The quote on the spine of their army book for third edition said their arrogance is matched only by their firepower Like I've always loved Mm-hmm and so So space marines have always have remained the poster boys and chaos space marines Have been kind of the anti-postor boysiposterbois, the dark mirror of that. And so because these are two of the most popular armies, that narrative of marine versus marine, and the devoys of chaos screaming for the destruction of the false emperor and let the galaxy burn, you know, all of that has become more and more central to the thing that is Warhammer 40,000. And throughout editions starting in 1993

moving up for another, you know, 20 plus years, the present day in the age of the Imperium is the very end of Millennium 41, thus Warhammer 40,000. Here 999 M41 is where the timelines all stop. And, you know, we are we are we are upset on all sides by the mutant and the traitor and the and the xen Clock from the Union of Nuclear Scientists. When I were growing up, we were at seven minutes to midnight. There's a similar tone in the way the present of 40K is described in these editions of the rule book. It is, it is almost midnight, and we are on the verge of our destruction, and it is only through you know, these desperate measures that we can, that we can, you know, maintain the existence of humanity. And it was a thematic component throughout Alan Moore's watchman, too, a

known Brit in the 80s at that time writing essentially like a scathing, I don't wanna call it a satire, but in many ways it is kind of, it's not a Manipian satire because it's not just listing things, but it is, what would you call that? Like, I don't even know what I'd call it a version of a genre it's it's well it's it's a it's a it's a reconstruction that is all it is a subversion it is a it is a subversion of it's a critique to say the superhero yeah well it's a subversion. It is a subversion of...

It's a critique to say that. The superhero, yeah, well, it's a subversion of the superhero genre. And it is a critique of the Cold War. And like, I don't know, it's an allegory. Yeah, I don't know, man, it's an allegory. Yeah, but anyway, the brutality is very clear in that series. The and the doomsday clock plays a big part in it. And you have somebody who is so far removed from the issue.

I mean, you've got some parallels going on there. Like, yeah, that's, that's happening. I believe that was what 85 86 the watchman, um, I could be wrong, but I know it was committee eighties. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is product the eighties, but um, for sure, you know, it very much was, um, you know, it was a product of its time. Yeah, September 86. Okay. When watchmen started, yeah. Yeah.

Um, you know, and this would have been something that all of these creators would have read and taken in because it's. Yeah. Dark as fuck. And they're doing, you know, yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah.

So those are, those are definitely parts of the themes that are present here and that get, and again, that get carried through. And so the third edition of the game came out in 1998. And a lot happened between second and third edition in terms of rules. So the first edition of the game was designed primarily to be like skirmish level. Each side would have 10 or 15 models on the table. Second edition came out and it was like no, no, we're playing this at the company level.

You're going to have 25 to 30 models on the table. You're gonna have a much bigger force, depending on what army you're playing. If you're playing Imperial Guard, you're gonna have even more models than that. And then third edition went, okay, we like the scale of game that we have going on here. We wanna make that easier and faster to play. And so a whole lot

of rules got streamlined and simplified. Now, the theory also goes within fandom, within, within players of the game, within the 40k community, those of us who are paleo nerds also believe that there was a conscious effort to make the rules simpler in order to bring the demographic of the game down age-wise. So for keto nerds and South Beach diet nerds and Mediterranean diet nerds, not just paleo nerds. Yeah. Yeah. That's what goes at Kins nerds. Yeah, this is you have screwed them. Yeah, whatever. He died of a heart attack. Fuck that. So. Okay. And so just to reset. Yeah. First edition comes out what year? And so just to reset, first edition comes out what year? Rogue trader is 87. And second edition?

93. And third edition 98. 98. Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I'm just like kind of thinking of the timelines that are lining up and these are all printed out of nodding hint, right? This is all still very much bridge company.

Yeah, this is very much British company. By the time 30th edition came out, I wasn't able to find data anywhere about like what the balance of cash flow was from UK or European players versus American players. But I'm confident that the balance was starting to shift by certainly by fourth edition. So during, and also something that's notable in third edition, a whole new faction got introduced. Previously, you had space marines, chaos space marines,

you had Eldar, you had squats at some point in second edition, squats disappeared between second and third edition. And I could do a whole episode on the history of what happened with the squats. But squats as an army option disappeared. And in third edition that they introduced a whole new race called the Tao to apostrophe AU. And the aesthetic, this, you have the closest thing that 40K has to an edition war is the opinions of members of the community about the existence of the towel. So we've talked about in Dungeons and Dragons, you have people who are hard over about second edition or third edition and like fuck you know, fuck fourth edition. And if you're playing anything after second, you're not really playing D&D. You know, screw you.

Fifth edition is so much easier. You need to like, you have you have edition wards, right? Yeah. Within 40k, within the 40k community. And this is mostly kind of calm down. But like when the towel came out, there were so many people who were just angry about the creation and inclusion of the towel in the game, because at this point, we have this established universe, and we have this tone that's established for this universe, right? It's grimdark.

Everybody is at each other's throats. If you're allied with somebody, you're only allied for long enough to deal with whatever the immediate threat is, and then you're going to try to kill each other, you know, nobody gets along, you know, it's grimdark, right? And then they introduce the towel and the towel have all this sleek swoopy high tech shit. And like the LDR have high tech shit, but their high tech shit looks organic and it's very clearly, you know, they have their own kind of aesthetic, but the towel show up and they've got these, these like, you know, swift moving power suit robots that look like something out of a mecha anime and they're,

they are the, the Tao themselves are the leaders of a commonwealth where they've brought multiple races under their leadership. So within a Tao army, you're going to have vestibed units and vest bids are these bug like flying guys. And you're going to have crew who are these, you know, semi barbaric kind of, you know, scouts that they use. And it's this entirely different kind of anesthetic because they have. So, it's a word they have. Whoa. Is what you're saying. You know, in retrospect, I'm just thinking about like the dates that you gave me on these things. Yeah, the first edition came out with old iron pants and charge, yeah, Maggie Thatcher.

Yeah. And then John Major was in charge for the second edition that came out. Okay. And then by 98, you have Tony Blair. Oh, shit, you do. Yeah, he's the first labor guy. He's very much a coalitionist. Yeah.

And you have, I mean, if you remember, when we talked about punk music, have a larger acceptance of Pakistani, as well as West Indies, Jamaican, and so on in the late 90s, enclaves and neighborhoods and as well as immigrants coming in in the late 90s. And so, and then on the American side, you know, it was Reagan and Bush and then the third edition would be under Clinton.

But more importantly, I think on some levels, you had Reagan and Bush who had democratic legislatures that they were working with, who they worked with, and then you had Clinton, and by the time, by the time third edition comes out, you have contract with America and impeachment Clinton. Yeah, and worth noting since we're talking about the real world timeline.

Yeah, yeah, it's we're talking about the real world timeline. The third edition, Tau Codex came out in 2001. Oh, okay. So yeah, yeah, so that's just like, yes, everything in October of 2001 or, oh no, it was earlier in the year. Okay. Yeah. And, and of course, since it was, since it was printed in 2001, they probably have been working on it since 1999. Right. So, so yeah, So yeah. So there was this, the tailgrain introduced, it's like, what are you trying to do, bring this, bring this anime aesthetic into 40K with Mecha and all this stuff and the way, and the way Tao worked on the tabletop was different.

And I mean, I could get into the weeds, you know, talking about the mechanics, but it was the towery departure in a way that some fans were like, this is awesome. Mostly younger fans were like, this is awesome. Mostly younger fans were like, this is awesome. And then a lot of, you know, Gen Xer, the players of the game were like, fuck you for bringing that to my table. No. Yeah, you know, we talked about this with the X-Wing Miniatures game

was like, it's called X-Wing. And by the time they came out with B-Wings and K-Wings and tie defenders and tie aggressors, it's like X-wings can't hold up to some of these things. Yeah. And so balance is kind of thrown into like, well, it depends on what money you've spent on it and stuff like that. Yeah.

And I'm not saying that's necessarily that, but I could certainly see that being kind of a driving factor as well. Yeah. but I could certainly see that being kind of a driving factor as well. Yeah, game balance, you know, in any kind of tabletop game, anytime a tabletop war game, which X-wing counts as one, it's a small scale, it's a skirmish game. Yep. In any kind of tabletop war game, balance is going to be a hobgoblin for developers to deal with. Anytime they want to try to come up with, hey, let's come up with a new mechanic to try to make things,

you should try to keep things fresh, right? I want to come up with this mechanic where you have your unit, okay, so to get a little bit into the weeds about it, Tao would have, you have your guy, your Tao soldier in a power suit, and that power suit would have drones that now he's able to control.

And like he can choose whether he wants his drones to be offensive and be semi-independent guns. So he gets to do more shooting, or he can take a drone that's a marker light, which you can say, okay, I don't have line of sight to this target, but my drone does, and my drone shines a marker light on that unit, and I can make it easier for this other unit or me to hit them. Get some indirect fire in there, right? Yeah, and it's a whole thing that, like, previously within the context of all of the tactical situations

you were gonna find yourself in, it was like, we'll have the fuck do any of this, right? So there's some frustration there. Because it's a minis game, so line of sight matters a lot. Yeah, right. It's a big, big fucking deal. And so you could get like, do the towel come with their own psychers?

Like, could you have? No. One of the things that made them special was they are utterly blind to the warp. They have no psychics. Okay. And like in universe, there's all kinds of back and forth about, you know, are they some kind of engineered race? Has somebody created them accelerated their evolution, you know, to turn them into some kind of tool. They didn't have any kind of psychics. One of the reliable ways to deal with them was

bring a librarian and fuck them up. One of the notable things about 30 edition is the introduction of this new race, which caused this big, uh, kind of hollow below, right? Sure. So then in 2004, the fourth edition of the game comes out. game comes out. Now this is the fourth edition comes out in 2004. D&D had come out with third ed, I think in 2000. Let me think back. 2001 to say was wait in 2000 because I was I was in Hollister. Okay. Teaching or I was about to start teaching in Hollister. More more of the point we are seeing multiple editions coming out. So even though they just come out with third ed in 98 now other game companies are coming out with new additions and so they're saying you know oh people are buying addition stuff let's hop on that train

or was it true? Well oh shit we need to fix what we did in third-ed. Like organically what you wind up finding out looking at the timeline is that about every five years or so, sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more, like the difference between ninth and tenth edition is only like three years. And actually the difference between eighth and ninth is pretty short. Like we've gone from eighth edition to tenth edition coming out this year. Eighth edition was 2017. eighth edition to 10th edition coming out this year. Eighth edition was 2017. So it's been like three years recently. Part of that is that 10th edition is a whole, they've made a lot of changes to the rules. But anyway, it's, I don't think it's a case of like D&D is doing this thing. So like we've got to do this thing because 40k as a game is a different kind of beast. Not we've got to but oh look what they can do.

Now we can get away with or we can do. Like people are already spending money on this. I bet you knew that our table are, tabletop people are spending money on this. I bet you we could get many shares people to spend money on this. Like, yeah, I, I, I, not replacement goods. That might be part of it. Um, but I think see games workshop doesn't have the same issues that wizards does because they're not owned by Hasbro. Well, that's only recently though. Like, well, that's third edition, fourth edition, fifth edition of D&D. Hasbro owned, uh, what's the, well, no, I'm sorry. No, uh, Hasbro has bro is fourth. Yeah. Fourth edition was as broke. But yeah, no. Third edition. Third. Yeah, what's the bottom and ended third? Yeah, my having been in the community

for this whole evolution. What winds up happening is they come out with a new edition of the game and they say, Hey, we streamlined this. We made this simpler. We did this that and the other thing. We fixed these things. And everybody's like, you know, some combination of that's awesome. And, you know, fucking fucking fat follow up, you know, bitch again moaning.

And, you know, there's both extremes every time. And everybody, you know, tries the game and, and you know, plays it. And then they come out with, you out with codex space marines, they come out with this edition's codex for L-DAR and all of that. What you wind up having, like you were talking about with X-Wing, is now X-Wing can't compete every edition. They've worked really hard every edition that we're not going to have codex creep. That's the term for it. We're not going to have codex creep. That's that's the term for it. We're not going to have codex creep this time. But it always winds up happening like in

in if I'm remembering right, it was either fourth or fifth edition that came out with a new tyrannid codex and everybody was like, what the fuck? The galaxy is doomed. We're all going to be devoured by fucking insects like oh my god. And then in the next edition, they came out with the Eldar codex and everybody just threw their hands up at the ear and bitched. And those of us who play Eldar went, yes, yes, our place in the galaxy is restored. You know, but you know, and then they've got to go and go, okay, wait, we got to we got to change some things. And so it's it's kind of an organic. Okay, we're having to do these things to fix these balance issues that come up. And now we've done so many of these things that okay, we might as well just say fuck it and come out with a new edition of the game. And so it is a more organic thing as it develops.

But I want to talk about fourth edition because fourth edition comes out in 2004. Around about this time I started working as an employee of Games Workshop at a retail store in Washington in the Linwood Mall. I did my time as a red shirt. And during fourth edition in 2005, the Black Library Games Workshop, publishing arm, started putting out the Horus Heresy novels. Okay. And this is this is important because for all of this time the Horus Heresy had been this important event like in the history of the galaxy

that had repercussions for every other race, you know, and, but it was, but it was always shrouded in this. This is, this is the semi-mythical, you know, past of the galaxy. And most of the inhabitants of the Imperium don't even really know the details of what happened because chaos and they don't know chaos fucking exists. Like, you know, and so they decided, you know what, there enough enough people have enough emotionally invested in this that we're gonna we're gonna start trying to tell the story and we'll see how it goes like you know and so all the horse hair a C series started in 2005 And I had looked this up and now I can't find it anymore

But because I wanted to give the title of the first novel, but I'll have to look it up later. And they sold so many copies of the first so many space marine fanboys were like, oh my god. And the first few books in the series are really actually for, you know, 40K universe thick. Really good. They're, they're, they're entertained. They're an entertaining read. And if you're invested in the setting, there are things in every one of the books

that you're gonna be like, oh, that's awesome. You know, and so they start real, not just crystallizing, but, but like chiseling down in stone. This is what the history of the galaxy is and so That series has now grown to a series of 62 novels as of our recording right now in 2023 I looked it up It is in fact 62 I had remembered that correctly last episode and 62, I had remembered that correctly last episode. And we are coming up on the ending of the novel series as the novel series has finally gotten around to the Siege of Terra. And we're going to

finally see the detailed novelization of the final battle between the Emperor and Horus a novelization of the final battle between the emperor and Horus and Sanguinius's defense of the eternity gate and You know the the battles between Angron and Sanguinius directly fighting one another and all of the stuff that been mentioned I Won't say in passing but had been you know like five lines in a piece of fiction here and mentioned in the space marine codex here. And now they're writing these novels and these novels are being written. In many, in most cases, in the early part of the series, they're being written from point of view of Marines in the legions. So this is now when we see that no, no, at the founding of the Imperium, they were not chapters. They were legions and

Each legion was not a thousand men strong each legion was 20,000 men strong. They were these armies into and of themselves and they were the spearheads of crusade fleets that had You know millions of members of the of the Imperial not the Imperial Guard, which is what it is in the 41st and the Lenin, but the Imperial Army, heading off into the stars to bring unification to humanity and unification is always capitalized. And so the series starts and they detail And so the series starts and they detail how Horus became corrupted by chaos. And we find out who it was, who initially started that happening.

And he was a chaplain of the word bearers, chapter, our word bearers legion named Aerobus, and just as a side note, fuck Aerobus. And so, you know, we start seeing all of these details over the course of from 2005 until today, this story has been fleshed out, novel by novel by novel, volume by volume by volume, and we have seen the characters of the primarchs. Who by this time, by the time of fourth edition, we understood the backstory of Jagate Khan, leader of the white scars, a primarch of the white scars. We knew the backstory of Lionel Johnson, the, you know, primark of the first legion.

Like we had heard their back stories, but now over the course of the novel series, we have seen them as protagonists in in these novels or or second due to agonists. in all of these novels. We've seen how the remember overhearing as an employee of the store on Thursday game night, hearing the guys who've gotten a hold of like the flight of the Isonstein, which is like the third or fourth novel in the series series, talking about, oh yeah, no man, Garo and this guy and this guy, the loyalists, the members of the death guard who remain loyal, they're fleeing the system to try to get to terror,

to let the emperor know about all of this, but this other stuff is going on. And like the intense level of passion and like this is so freaking cool that was going on with all of this was amazing and and having all of that is great. The downside to that is that once you start putting those things down that way, you take away room for people to tell their own story. Right, you codify things. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I run into the same issue with playing Star Wars. If you play Star Wars in the era that is prescribed by the books, I don't care what edition you're playing. I happen to be playing in the West End games edition, right? So it's it's well before Disney bought it. Yeah. But you're still your you are kind of constrained to either doing one of two things saying, oh yeah yeah, we're gonna hang out on the outer rim the whole time where the story didn't take place. Or you're running and gunning where the story took place

and you're trying to fit in between the things that George Lucas approved and so on and so forth. Yeah. As again, there was a continuity person. You know, which is one of the reasons, you know, my kids were, you know, they both wanted to play wiki Jedi. I'm like, well, that doesn't fucking exist. So I guess we're going to go back a ways that has not been written about very much. And so players, you

know, they don't get to, once you codify things, I think it's fantastic to have things codified quite often. But I understand the downside of that is also that like, oh, you no longer have half the latitude you used to have. Now, you either have to do it by kind of shoe-horning things in or shoe-horning things out. But yeah, you don't, you know, it's that story I told you about Deli Parton talking to the cast of SNL about like, you know, well, once you see it on TV, Darren didn't have an afro. Like, you know, same kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and I, yeah, that's. So the books getting written is great, but it does codify things. It creates things and yeah, it codifies things. And so now this is this is the point at which within the gaming community starting around. It's not an I don't want it's not forth, but starting around fifth edition in 2008, I want to say, people within the fan community actually started saying, you know what, I want to play games of 40k in the 30k universe. I want to play something set in the time period described in these novels. Sure. And one of the themes that keeps coming up in the novels is, during the great crusade, the tech level was different. You know, the original intention of the emperor was for space marines to carry conversion

beamers, or not, sorry. Anyway, more advanced beam weapons, you know, basically death ray weapons as their primary armament. But over the course of the crusade, they just weren't able to maintain that logistically over those distances. And so that's why Marines have carried bolters ever since, because bolters are easy to manufacture. Their ammunition is easy to manufacture.

It's like the AK-47 of the far future, right? And like one of the iconic kind of aspirational, I will know I have made it as a nerd when I'm able to get a hold of one of these models. For a very long time was a Thunderhawk gunship, which is this gigantic gunship, which is this gigantic transport for space marines. And in reading the Horus Harrison novels, you'll learn that no, no, during the heresy they had even bigger transports. And the Thunderhawk came about later in the crusade because they didn't have the ability to keep manufacturing the bigger, more advanced ones. And so you have 30K characters riding aboard a thunderhawk going, man, this thing is a bucket of bolts.

What, you know, and, and, you know, and so people were like, no, no, I want to play a game in heresy. I want to have Legion Marines fighting other Legion Marines and So fans started coming up with hey particularly a group of fans calling themselves the fly Lords of Tara You know started coming up with a set of Horus's terracy rules well then Games Workshop not being dummies

Well, then games workshop not being dummies put out their own set of rules that were the large, leave very similar to the ones that were developed by these fans, but had some important differences where it was, okay, no, if you want to play a Horus Heresy game, here's how that's gonna work. And for a long time, it was a specialist game put out by Forge World, which is the specialist game arm, arm of games for a shout. And so there was kind of this parallel thing going on. Well, one of the, one of the parallel thing going on. Well, one of the one of the

constant truths, if such a thing exists, of the 41st millennium was always that anytime you heard the story of a primark, it always ended with, and this is where he died. And this is, and this is how in the, you know, sometime in the 30th third millennium, you know, in the case of Lehman Russ, you know, on this anniversary of the emperor's death or ascension, they call it his ascension to the golden throne. On this anniversary, Laman Russ was leading his brothers in a feast. And suddenly he stared off into the distance and fell to his knees. And when he came out of, when he came out of this state, he said that he'd had a vision. And he called all of his, all of his closest brothers to him, and they headed off on their own crusade. And he was going to go, you know, find something.

brothers to him and they headed off on their own crusade and he was going to go, you know, find something because he had this vision. And so he haired off into the eye of terror. And we haven't heard from him, but, you know, the space walls believe he's still alive and he's going to come back for the wolf time. That's always the way these things end. It started out that, you know, Robaldorn is dead, turned into a Rogal Dorn disappeared, and the Imperial Fists, the only thing they were able to find was one of his, one of his, the bones of one of his hands are kept as a relic, you know, on their, on their home world. Right. Or aboard their, their, fortress ship. You know, it was always that these are these figures of legend. This is King Arthur. And they may not have died, but they're not here anymore, right? Right. A few of them were definitely like, no, no, he's dead. Like, he is, he is D-D-D,

not like, no, no. But most of them, there was always, you know, he, you know, we believe he's gonna come back or whatever, we don't know what happened to him. But they weren't there. Well, in 30K, once, once Games Workshop started putting out the game of the Horus Heresy, it was like, well, these are some of the central characters of these novels.

Like, if you're playing 30K, man, you, you, want to be able to put your primark on the table. Like because he was there. Like, no man, I want to recreate Istvan and that means I have to have Vulcan on the table. Because like he was there, right? And so forge World started putting out models of the primarchs for the Horace Heresy game. And I don't have a solid date for when that happened, but I want to say it was around about, I got to take a look at some other dates here to kind of triangulate it, sorry.

But around about, by sixth edition in 2012, they were well on their way to having put out resin very expensive a couple hundred bucks for a model resin models of the primarks for games of Horace heresy Okay, and this was this was a specialized collector thing and It was strictly for 30k or Horace Heresy. Well, then in 2017, Athe Edition was released. And Athe Edition upended a whole bunch of truths about the 40K universe. Number one, Robert Gelliman shows up the story about the primark of the Ultramarines

up to this point was that he was sitting in, he had been mortally wounded in a fight against a chaos primark. And he had been placed in a stasis field. And him sitting in the stasis field was the site of pilgrimage for Imperial citizens for 10,000 years. Okay. And in some codices, they would say, and there are those who swear that over time they can see his wound gradually healing.

But he's still in stasis and like, you know, he's not, he's not really here. Well, so 2017, eighth edition comes out and they put out a model of robot-gulliman. They series of campaign books. Like, here is a campaign for the game with scenarios and rules for these forces. Robot-gulliman is one of the models you can have on the table. And here is the story of how he got resurrected through an alliance of convenience with an LDR death cult,

it's a convoluted crazy 40K over the top shit. But all of a sudden Robert Gulliman is back. And by the way, at the same time, we're also going to introduce a whole new type of space marine. See before this happened to Gulliman, back in the 33rd millennium, he went to this, this, you know, tech priest and said, you know, the galaxy is going to need, you know, a different kind of marine. I'm reorganizing the legions into chapters and forcing them to break up. And we're going to need individual Marines to be even better than they already are.

I need you to look at what the emperor did and try to get closer to his original vision. Okay. And this tech priest, fast off and disappeared for 10,000 years. And all of a sudden, Gollumman comes back and goes, hey, I got to check on that tech priest. And he finds the tech priest, and tech priest goes, oh yeah, no, I got these guys, they're premier, I call them Primeris Marines.

And all of a sudden, we have space marine models that are bigger than regular marine models. That have two wounds in the game rather than only one. And we're releasing a whole new set of vehicles that are a premarist based. And all of a sudden we have advancement in the technological timeline in the war.

Like, oh yeah, no, I figured all the stuff out. And I improved, I improved on technology, which previously was like, the adeptus mechanicus don't do that, that's heretical. Okay. But no, here he did, and it's fine now, because Gullumman says it is, and by the way, we have Gullumman and we have Magnus,

the red is a chaos primarch, and then they came out with Mortarian, yeah, Mortarian, as another chaos primarchic and we're putting them on the table. And we have this dramatic upending of what had been a static setting for 24 years, from 93 until 2017, it had always been one minute to midnight. It had always been 999 M41 in the present. It had always been technology stopped advancing actually long before the 31st of the lane. It had started decaying and got stuck in the 31st

of the lane. And now they make all these changes and all this stuff comes out all kind of at the same time. And I simultaneously kind of lost my interest waned. And so now the thing is they have never released another loyalist primer, as I mentioned, and this is one that I'm a huge fan of. It's Lionel Johnson of the dark angels. And I was like, well, okay, fine. I'm going to have to get into 10th edition because that's too cool. But the timeline, this is the other thing that changed in majorly, in the materials for this new campaign, it's, well, a Gelliman shows up at $9.99, M41 is resurrected, does all this stuff. And then he starts a new crusade because the galaxy, there's a new chaos rift that's opened

up that's kept that's cut off part of the part of the Imperium from the other part of the Imperium. And so anyway, there's this crusade that he starts, that they then publish a couple of novels about. And oh yeah, by the way, the present of the galaxy in the eighth edition rule book is now a century into the 42nd millennium. Okay.

And so, what I find interesting is why this change from the universe is static. We are always at one minute to midnight. What is it that changed that led to this decision that, okay, well, we're going to advance the timeline. We're going to bring a primark back to the table onto the table in 40K for the first time, loyalist primark. And we're going to advance, we're going to create the story that moves us into a new millennium. And I can't help but wonder if like there are a couple of things that come to mind. And and one of them is by the time Athedition came out, Rick

Priestley had long since retired. Andy Chambers, right? Yeah. Okay. Andy Chambers had left the company. Andy Chambers is one of the guys that was that was a writer for for Games Workshop. I'm a huge fanboy of Andy Chambers and his work within the setting. He'd written a whole bunch of stuff. Jervis Johnson had left retired, left the company. All of the guys who had been part of the writing of the first several editions of the game by this point have left. The second generation of writers,

remember that I said that the Horace Heresy is like a wrestling promo that's outlasted multiple generations of promoters. Yeah. So the second generation of writers, some of the earliest ones of them have left and we now have like a third group coming in because it's been going on close to 30 years now, right?

I mean, this kind of parallels the bullet club, although that's a much more shrunk down thing. Bullet Club was this group of Gaijin wrestlers who were running Roshod in Japan. And then when one of them, I think it was AJ Styles first, got signed to WWE, they beat him up and kicked him out, right? And then they brought in the next guy. And I might be mixing it up. But like the Bullock Club, you know, continued to exist in multiple iterations, despite being no, you know, none of the original members it still had the same ideology. That was only over the course of like maybe eight to 10 years.

So a little different, but. Well, it's a ship of theses kind of thing. Yeah, in kind of story-continuity terms. And staffing terms. And, you know, and of course, terms and staffing terms. And, you know, and of course there are plenty of real world business reasons for making a decision like this. Yeah.

But creatively within the culture, I find it interesting that this change to bigger, better Marines and, you know, and Gullim and his back and he's now the regent of the Imperium ties in with real world events like Brexit, like's Johnson. Yeah. Yeah. And on this side of the pond, um, Maga and Donald Trump. Sure. And it's worth noting in this context that as I mentioned in the first episode, where we talked about 40k back in episode three of the podcast, um, part of what also drove me out of the hobby was the fact that there were by this time a whole lot of players who were younger than me. So all the all the guys who took Warhammer 40K imagery and explicitly wound up using it for pro Trump kind of propaganda. And well, you know, it's just jokes, bro, and that bullshit. But like they started referring to God,

emperor, Trump and taking one of the iconic images of the emperor. There's a painting that one of the studio artists did of the battle between the emperor and Horus, and they took that image of the emperor and they stuck Trump's face over the emperor's face, and that became a meme. And it was like, there are so many levels on which this pisses me off. Number one, you're co-opting a hobby in a universe I have devoted a lot of emotional energy to for your bullshit, fascist political ideology. First and foremost, number one, that's bullshit. Fuck you. Number two, you're completely not understanding the fact that like this is all fucking satire.

And now we come back to what I said to put a pin in back in the last episode with Rick Priestley himself saying that in the original edition of the game, the space marines are some of the most self-deceiving parts of the universe, because they characterize themselves and everybody within the Imperium characterizes them as these huge heroic figures, and the Emperor might very well be just a vegetable, right? And or not even that, the emperor might be truly dead. And there's no way of knowing. Right. And it's all written.

It was all written in the first three editions of the game. There was still this very strong undercurrent of satire. And in the first three editions of the game, there was still this very strong undercurrent of satire. Orcs still sound like soccer hooligans. And originally, when they were first written, it was very clear, hey, this is, look at what we're lifting from. And then it became codified. And a second and a third generation of players picked it up uncritically.

You know, and, and, and that, that didn't, that got lost in translation across, across groups of players. And so all of a sudden we have bigger, better Marines and we have a real deal primer showing up as the big damn hero. And at the same time in the real world, we've now had this similar, well, I don't know how to say, I'm floundering a little bit in the language to use, but there and bombast, ceasing to be ironic or ceasing to be satirical and bombast becoming the thing, if that makes sense. And then at we've also by this time in the real world seen the dissolution, the threats that we are facing are very different have changed from what there was in 1987.

The Doomstake clock in 1987 was entirely about nuclear holocaust. And as we've talked about on the podcast, any number of times before, so much of our science fiction and so much of our fantasy reflected that fear of an apocalypse. Well, after a while for anybody playing the game, anybody picking the game up knew this idea of, you know, 10 minutes to midnight, five minutes to midnight, you know, it is, you know, 999, 999, M41, like we're literal minutes from midnight at the end of the 41st millennium, like for anybody who joined the game or started the game after 5th edition, like that doesn't have the same kind of relevance as for a gen XR, right? Because millennials don't remember a time, don't, don't remember the cold war.

You know, they, they, they, they were many of the most of them were born before it was over, but they don't really, they, they weren't saturated in it the way we were. Right. And so for them, this seems tired. Like for fuck's sake, when are you going to move on? Can we bring something else into this? Can we do something and change something up? And kind of in the same way that when third third edition became fourth edition D&D, you

know, a lot of the mechanics in fourth edition D&D were very clearly borrowing from the way MMOs work. Right. Because newer players had their introduction to Dungeons and Dragons style fantasy not through Dungeons and Dragons, but through Warcraft or World of Warcraft, right? and so You know generationally there is this this need to introduce something new do something different And so part of part of my issues are also rooted in being old and you know get off my lawn.

And I kind of recommend I've come to be at peace with that. And that's part of the reason why I've you know given in and gotten into started getting in a tent. But now with ninth edition and 10th edition, there was this seismic change with eighth edition. And now that's become the new, because I mean, it's only been six years. That's the new norm, that's the new norm. Yeah, and that's the new normal.

Now, we have the endometus crusade as being part of the present of the game and the primaris chapters of Marines and older chapters of Marines getting primaris members and learning how to upgrade themselves and you know into how to get the new implants and turn you know become primaris. And we've had classic characters from chapters like the Space Wolves and the Blood Angels across the Rubicon Primeras in the language of the game. And so they've got new models who now have buffed up stat lines because they got the new

parts. And again, there's a solid business reason to do this. Like, well, okay, anybody who has a regular black man model, like they've bought that model. They don't need to buy another one until, oh, hey, look, now, and there's also the fact that Xers are finally getting a share of the economy. Like, and I mean, that cannot be understated. Like I was thinking about, you know,

the fact that my brother has the model of a tarask and a giant fucking dragon. Like I know what those things cost. I'm like, man, you're doing well. Um, you know, but like the symbols, right? Yeah, you know, but it's one of those things of like, oh, wow, we do have, some of us have those of us who are hobbyists. And stuff like that often will now have, because we'll be in our 40s and 50s.

We will often now have money to spend on these things. So it makes sense that the thing that we grew up only having, you know, this little bit here, this little bit there. And now our price point is much higher. So I think there's just an economic aspect there too. But I do think there's this weird flattening of populism that has happened when you elect clown shoes as leaders throughout the world. Okay.

As you have populism, as we've spoken of in the whole Kogan episode, it's tremendous amount of populism that has really flattened the class curve in a lot of ways. So like, I'm sorry, but like, there's not that much reverence for high office anymore. So why would there be that much mythological reverence for primarchs now? Yeah. So they are work. So you can purchase them. They are not just background of like, like, there is, um, strad miniatures for cursive strad in D and D. There's a part of me that's like, he should always be in the background, pulling the strings and never someone you actually encounter that you can do battle with.

Like if you run into strad, you're fucking dead, man. Theoretically, right? Like, but now it's normal to like Tiamat should be a thing you always run from or and the game ends and your, your epic battle with Tiamat and you die heroically, right? Yeah. Now you could conceive. You could take her. Right. And I think that some again, there's a part of me, there's a part of me once, once to make a statement about, you know, the the arrogance of ignorance there. Like, I can take her. Right.

Uh, the thing is though is that we, we again at the age that we're at, we have done this our whole lives, where's the next place you go? Well, it is, it is that final thing, right? And also our price point. And also, I genuinely do think that like, you know, time and again, we have been shown that the people that we have lauded and the people that we have put on pedestals have proven armfully human in all kinds of terrible ways. Through our access to them via social media and so forth. And I also think that it could also be just on a personal level. In 2017, when you backed away from it, there were a few things happening politically, yes, but also personally, you were getting ready to be a dad.

True. So you got to trim the fat. Yeah, I'd love to paint many of these, but I've got to build a crib, you know? Yeah. And the reprioritization of your life, interestingly coincides with the fact that your son is your child is now a school age. There's something there too, you know. So I don't know the wallpaper. I had. Yeah. You know, but, um, you know, I do think, though, that on a much more macro level, zoomed out, not everybody is the father of a school aged child now.

So I do think that we're seeing that price point go up because we have a greater share of the economy than we did 13 years ago. And I do think that also that economy has grown around these games. And so the price points have gone up as well. That is certainly true. And again, that flattening of our lauding of public figures, I genuinely do think. I mean, fucking Boris Johnson, I mean, really, you know, they tried with the person who came in after him and then now they're really trying with Richie Sunak as a, hey, it's in his name and also, you know,

down in street is the closest you'll ever get to this asshole, like he's in all the garks, all the gark, you know. Yeah. Will he outlast the head of lettuce. Right. Right. My question. Right.

You know, but more importantly though, like they're trying to go back to, no, these are unreachable people and their idealized versions. And it's like, it's already off the rows. Yeah. And in that context, and interesting kind of side note, you know, you talk about the flattening of populism in the novelization of Golemman's story of returning to life. He winds up traveling to Tara and he visits his father, the emperor. And what he finds out is there is big, red spoiler alert for a novel that's, you know, six years old. He is, the emperor is so psychically powerful that like you can't avoid his thoughts if you are somebody like a primark. And he sees the Emperor is conscious and has been conscious for the last 10,000 years.

The Emperor sees him and all of the Emperor's will is directed toward maintaining the Astronomical and the wards and everything protecting Earth. And so he's not able to put on any kind of pretense. And so telepathically, Gullimmon realizes that the Emperor sees him and is pleased that his tool has returned, that the emperor never saw him or any of the other primarchs as his sons. They had spoken of him and revered him as their father. They had this view of him as this paternal figure. And to the emperor, they were a project. Well, that hits way too close to home political. And, you know, so, you know, and so there's There's some things going on there with, you know, perception of power. Well, and yeah, the, the, um, the veil being lifted by, by proximity to that power too,

because they've never gotten to them before, you know. Yeah. But again, I think some of that is also, I mean, fuck 62 books, you're going to get to that development. Yeah. That's true. 19 books in the Yu-Juan Vong, we killed one solo kid off. Like, through. The bucket died to start the whole thing. Spoiler alert on a book that's over 20 years old.

You killed the family dog in the first book, and you killed like the the sion of the solo Skywalker legacy in like the twelfth book. Yeah. You know, and and you know, it's an act bar dies too. You know, like although that was kind of a shout out to our are the FDR. Oh, okay. But, but, you know, I mean, you have, these are gonna be natural progressions that happen in a story this long. Because how else are you gonna keep us interested? How else are you gonna pay things off?

That's true. What's the point of having a 62 book arc, you know, if you're gonna, you know, or more, I assume, because they probably haven't finished. What's the point of having that arc if you're not going to end the story finally? Which itself is its own like take on an Armageddon clock too? I'm like, you know, I'm going to finally finish this for you. Yeah. And all that all makes sense. I mean, and since 2017, we have seen the death of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Laugh.

Yeah, that's true. So, but that is true. So those are my rejoinders and thoughts as to why you're seeing primarcs actually at the table now. Yeah, and I think, like I said in the last episode, I had not really been able to come to a conclusion about it. And so this has been my number one attempt at educating you about this central part of 40k lore and trying to come to an answer to this question. I think all of those are strong explanations. I think as with everything, it is a combination of factors and I think those are compelling

ones. combination of factors and I think those are compelling ones And I also think that you know as you say stated in our cyberpunk episodes and As we've stated when discussing things like satire Maybe the genre is coming to an end on some levels because we've caught up to it Like the reason we don't have cyberpunk much anymore is because we're living it. I think maybe... Good hasn't won very much lately. Yeah.

And so you have a intellectual property and it's not like they're not gonna to try to milk it. Of course, they are. What they have to go toward what society wants in some levels. But you have a grim, dark satire that we have outstripped. Good doesn't win. So, okay, yeah, you know what? This is, this is going to suck. But yeah, you're going to meet the the leader and it ain't going to be good, you know, and oh, you want dark. We'll go dark. It's like, oh, we're already darker than that. But we're going to follow through. You know, like there's like the it no longer needs to be a warning to us. We've blown past that.

Complete. Yeah. We missed that warning a while ago. Yeah. So it just, yeah, it seems to me that it would make sense that you're also meeting the emperor solving the question of is he a livers? He dead turns out he is alive and shitty. Which you know one of the one of the recurrent themes of all of the stories that we got over the course of the 25 plus years is as a dad he was a pretty shitty one.

Like anytime it was a story of a chaos primark There was always gonna be this moment where you were like wow biggie. That was a dick move like And I'd be interested in seeing what these men's relationships with their dads were Or their relationships honestly their their ideas toward the government because very often as we've seen with the spy who just died recently Hansen with two S's with the spy who just died recently, Hansen with two S's. He had a terrible relationship with his father, and that then transposed onto his relationship with his country that he was supposed to serve. And that's a pretty common weakness to exploit.

Oh, yeah. And so, just like when we looked at Simon and Seagull, when they created Superman, One of them had a dad who was shot to death in a robbery. So naturally his hero is bulletproof. Bulletproof, yeah. So yeah, beyond the explanation to the phenomenon, what is your takeaway here? Final thoughts, reflections?

I'm worried what's gonna come next. I mean, Grimdark came around because Margaret Thatcher and like, the Cyberpunk came around because Ronald Reagan on a lot of levels, you know. Yeah. And it's worse. It is magnitude worse. Yeah, I don't, I don't think we can psychologically handle the proportional reaction.

Yeah. So I'm curious. I'm curious as to what will happen next. Yeah, I want to say based on what I see with my students who are post-zoomers, like they're young enough that I don't think they even qualify as Gen Z. Right. They're, they're gen alpha. I, I believe right now, I choose to believe that I think what we are going to see, what they are going to react to.

And so what we are going to see being reflected, because they're too young to be writing it. But other people are going to see that they're picking it up when it's put down. I think there's room for some level of hope punk. I, you know, and that's the thing I was going to say next was that I really hope it's Muppets. I really hope. I really, yeah, I'm with this generation. I fully agree. Let's let's muppet the shit out of things. I think I think it's likely to be in the world.

I'm I'm envisioning that I that I want to visualize into existence. Based on what I'm seeing with my students, it's going to be the muppets with a lot of middle fingers. If that makes sense, like, you know, because they are the majority of them, because there's assholes in any demographic. But the majority of them are fiercely compassionate. They are very strongly motivated by a sense of justice. They are pissed off with everybody who came before them. And, you know, justifiably so. And so I hope, I genuinely hope that we see that, that reflected as muppets with a lot of swearing

and middle fingers. Like, yeah, I mean, I see the agreement more than I see the optimism. I see the compassion mixed with a you can't do that but not so much a I don't see hope with them. I see okay defiance and again I would love to see it but I you know I teach a level slightly higher than the one you teach, but my partner teaches one that is below the one that you teach. Yeah. And what I'm hearing is that like, we traumatize the shit out of these kids, partly to keep them safe and because we're so ill prepared. We did it. We did it, herculan task, but the knock on effect has been wildly traumatic,

and I think that that has, in many ways, burnt the lithium battery of hope down to 79%. Okay. And it will never charge beyond that for them. So I'd like to be wrong, but I really would like there to be more muppets. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's that meme going around of like, you know, replace all the characters with muppets, but one. Yeah. And that's that's kind of a fun exercise. You know, I, I, I of course go into like really terrible terrible shit and say, oh,

keep the cleaning lady who walks in on Jennifer Connolly, almost overdosing in in rec way and for a dream, but everyone else is muppets. Everybody else's muppets. Yeah, because see, see, I immediately went, I immediately went to 40k and, and you know, my, my first thought was, um, Malcadora is what is huge act man and everyone else's muppets. That that could be awesome. But I was actually thinking Malcadora the sigillite is, I know, some English actor, somebody, I and everybody else's muppets,

um, and anybody who knows Forty K. Laura will find that pretty funny. But, um, yeah, Malcador was essentially the Emperor's right hand mortal, psychr. He's the second most powerful psychic in the human race. And yeah, so he's human, but all the primarks are very large muppets. There you go. And it's like, yeah. So. Yeah.

Anyway, so as neither of us want to be found, I'm just going to go with recommendations and then what they should do about this podcast. So what are you recommending people in Bive or take in as far as medium goes. I'm going to very strongly recommend that everybody watch Kenobi, which is total, total departure from what we've been talking about. But there is, even though we know how that story is going to end, there is an optimism, kind of a one kind of optimism, but there's an optimism at the end of that story. I think it's a very powerful story of personal recovery. I don't know if I want to say redemption, recovery. I don't know if I want to say redemption, but Obi-Wan's arc in that story is really powerful and him starting where he starts and ending where he ends is positive and hopeful and I was I it affected me a great deal. So I'm going to

strongly recommend Kenobi. How about you? I'm actually gonna so this will be kind of niche because you have to have the Disney Plus or it but or maybe the ABC app I doubt it though. But the Muppets mayhem it's a 10 episode series And it's it's basically Electric mayhem tries to make an album and more More than the points for that. Yeah more to the point actually the the human the Nora Singh played by Lilly Singh the human Nora Singh played by Lilly Singh, the human record executive tries to get Electric Mehem to make an album. It's just fun. Each episode is named after a

song title and sometimes it comes into play. There's a goat involved named Darin that animal likes. There's just so much fun goodness to it. All right. Cool. And I mean, they redecorate Danny Trejo's house without telling him. And it's just, oh, it's fantastic. It is absolutely fantastic. So I'm going to recommend all 10 episodes of that because, okay, worth it. Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Where can they find this podcast and where should they, what should they do about it? Well, depending on how you are listening to us right now,

you can go to weba, weba, weba.geekhistorytime.com. If you are listening to us, you've either found us there or on Stitcher or on the Apple podcast app. However, you have found us, please take the time to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And we can collectively be found on Twitter at Geek History Time. And is there any plays you can be found, sir? Nope, like I said, we're both off the grid right now. It was just this podcast. All right. Cool.

Well, thank you for this for a Geek History of Time. I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.