About unreliable narrators, apocryphism and a non-standard view of “Warhammer”
Imagine, reader, that you were born in the world of “Warhammer 40k”, somewhere at the very bottom of a hive city that you never left. All your childhood, you listened to sermons about the God-Emperor and his demigod sons, about the forty-year history of human civilization, about the Imperium, which extends its power over the entire galaxy; about the dangers of the Warp and the creepy demons lurking in it, about the evil and insane demon worshipers who betrayed humanity; and your most favorite stories were the ones about the Angels of Death: superhumans who carry a part of His plan and stand guard over the Imperium, destroying foreigners and demons.
And now you hear that space marines have descended on your home planet to recruit new recruits. You are fifteen, you are strong and healthy, and, of course, you are going to take part in the selection. You pass the test with honor; what gives you strength is that out of the corner of your eye you see your idols watching you from afar. They seem so huge and powerful in their power armor.
You pass all the tests and, together with other lucky ones, get on the spaceship that is supposed to take you to a new life. You fly into the unknown through space, but for some reason no one is in a hurry to put you on the apothecary’s table and implant you with a dozen new organs. Instead, you are taught to use power armor. It creaks and rattles, it is dirty with dried blood inside, it smells strange, and the servos have long since lost their smoothness. And it rusts. When you ask your spaceman mentor about this, a little surprised, he suggests that you run for a can of enamel and paint over the rust yourself. And now paint his armor. And the armor of several of his friends, so as not to run twice for paint.
Nevertheless, you are delighted with the issued equipment. After putting on power armor, you feel inhuman strength in your arms and legs, and the armor adds half a meter to your height – and to your surprise, you already stand on a par with real space marines. The bolter snarls louder than any bandit fart from your neighborhood and gives you confidence despite the sticking safety.
Six months go by in training, and one day the officers say you’re ready. You tremble with joy and anticipation, expecting that now you will finally be made superhuman. Instead, you are sent into battle.
The combat is not at all like the stories about the Angels of Death. You don’t understand where you are. You crawl in the dirt and squeeze into the ruins of buildings, hiding from enemy fire. You’re firing your bolters off into the distance when what looks like a target’s signature flashes on the rippling retina display. You do not feel at all that you are the chosen soldiers of the Emperor: enemy shots take your lives one by one, without distinguishing between neophytes and “old ones”. At one point you almost feel a rush of courage as Captain Lysander, a glorified veteran of hundreds of campaigns, lifts you up to attack, only to be hit by an enemy shell and the legendary hero is left with only his massive hammer.
And yet you win. You stand in the middle of the corpses of enemies and see that they are dressed in the same armor as you, only painted in different colors. No horns and flayed human skin, no corpse-lined crests visible from space. Nearby, an apothecary works on your survivor earth sedatives as he continues to mutter under his breath “Tacts coming in… tactics coming in…”. And you tear off the helmet from one of the corpses – under it is not a mutant half-demon, but a young guy like you.
On the construction site, you are already standing among the “full-fledged space marines”, and you see how the deputy company commander accepts the hammer you found in the crater from the explosion and says that he is now the new captain Lysander.
In literature, there is such a concept as “unreliable narrator” – when a character on whose behalf the author speaks, informs the reader of deliberately inaccurate information about the plot and world of the work.
The very possibility of such an assumption opens up the possibility of very unusual interpretations of the original story, up to turning the plot upside down and writing apocryphal fan fiction. For example, in the Russian-speaking Tolkien community, several books were written based on the idea that The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings were in-world propaganda, history rewritten by the victors.
Games Workshop often invokes the principle of the unreliable narrator when they are pointed out inconsistencies in Wahi lore or inconsistencies in the fluff with what is happening in a tabletop wargame. The official position of the GV on this issue boils down to the fact that all books, other adaptations of the universe and lore insertions into codes and rulebooks are intraworld propaganda of the warring parties, and it cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the authors of GV refer to the topic of “the destruction of the real Vakhya” infrequently and rather superficially. And you, reader, try to think about how deep the rabbit hole is?
What if the setting is not forty thousand years old, but ten times less? This seems true considering how little has happened or changed since the Horus Heresy. What if the Heresy itself is mythologized into a magical fairy tale? Of course, the Emperor was no god at all: just a charismatic leader who, at the time, seemed a convenient figure for the elites of fragmented humanity. And he didn’t have any primarch sons: there were trusted generals and governors, some of whom decided they were fine without a Terran lord. Perhaps one or two of them were indeed his real children. What are the Chaos Gods, what are the Demons? Do not laugh, there are no gods, as the Emperor himself insisted during his lifetime: “domains of the gods” and “cult legions of traitors” are simply human states hostile to the Empire, formed by rebellious diadoches. You didn’t think the Imperium really stretched across the galaxy, did you? The culture of the separatists is not very different from the imperial culture: no mass sacrifices and bloody orgies, of course, take place there. It just so happened that during the long enmity, the demonization of their imperial propaganda became literal.
By the way, about the demons: should we say that the ignorant, but religious imperials take for them completely ordinary xenoras, with whom the diadoches once made alliances? But the Warp is, however, not the one that is told about in the imperial churches. This is normal hyperspace; ships actually disappear there on a regular basis, but this is due to the extreme unreliability of the hyperdrives. Knowledge and technology were really lost… And the dark people then invent fables about devils that eat starships.
On the subject of technology: no, the Adeptus Mechanicus is not really a church. It is a megacorporation built by those few scientists and engineers who have preserved the remnants of knowledge from the Dark Age of technology. Their closedness is explained very simply: thanks to the monopoly on technology, they have a firm grip on the Imperium by the balls, and the Diadochi states too – through offices-pads under the brand “Eretech”. Just imagine the profits! Quasi-religion in such a schedule is a convenient legend: “technores”, i.e. unauthorized “AdMech inc.” development and research, dangerous exclusively to their monopoly, but the corporation will make every conceivable and unimaginable effort to preserve it.
Psykers? They exist too, only propaganda and fiction greatly exaggerate their abilities, which are often limited to telepathy. And, of course, they are in no way related to hyperspace or xenos-“demons”: imperial bureaucrats are afraid of them precisely because the phenomenon has not been studied, and in general, due to their peculiarities, psykers are not inclined to conformism and trust the authorities. Those psykers who cannot be recruited into the service of superlight communications or the secret police are simply killed: Astronomicon is also a fiction. Ships between the stars, of course, are led by navigators, and they are really a little psykers, but much more just mathematicians who have not learned how to calculate flight routes through hyper. Like the Mechanicus, they created a closed corporation for themselves in order to maintain a monopoly, accepting only blood relatives as a share. Navigator “mutations”, which people whisper about, are banal degeneration from inbreeding. What can you do: CJSC “Navis Nobilite” does not like to share knowledge or property with outsiders; as they say, the books are closed.
And how did you get to such a life? Well, it was definitely not the purple lustful goddess in porridge that reminded me. The Era of Discord was most likely brought on by its own bosses. At the height of the Dark Age of Technology, our civilization approached the technological singularity, and things were doing especially well in the field of artificial intelligence. The increasing level of automation of management and decision-making threatened managers and bureaucrats with a loss of power and ownership, and in an attempt to maintain the status quo, they went a little overboard. Of course, there was no rebellion of the machines: the Iron Men, most likely, fought on the side of another human infighting, which lost. Of course, the subsequent ban on Izuversky Intellect was dictated by the same considerations.
The Imperium was actually an attempt to restore humanity to its former glory. In form, of course, but not in substance: the essence of the progressive society of the TET era was understood only by the Emperor himself, and that, most likely, incorrectly – he was born late. Well, after he reached the limits of powerful xenoempires, the limits of astropathic communication and the logistics of unreliable interstellar flights, his distant regions decided that they would be better off without a metropolis, and everything fell apart. The Emperor himself is really supported in the state of a formally living vegetable. As a nice symbol and just in case: it legitimizes the system existing in the Imperium, and he also concluded the contract with Mechanicus personally.
Well, I will finally return to what I started with. Most of the worlds of the Imperium, if they have overcome the technical level of the Middle Ages, are firmly stuck somewhere there, at the level of feudalism, in terms of culture and social relations. It is not surprising that, from the perspective of the common man, the Adeptus Astartes are angelic knights who simultaneously reproduce heroic myths and feudal ideas about proper military organization. In fact, space marines are a regular type of troops, a little more elite than the Guard, but no less expensive. And they need fancy heraldry, myth-making on the topic of their own history, immortal heroes and symbolic transformation into superhumans for internal consumption and cultivation of a sense of superiority – as in any elite troops. This is also only a plus for propaganda.
This is about where we can come if, in thinking about our favorite setting, we accept the assumption about the unreliability of the narrators: propagandists and simply dark, ignorant inhabitants of the world eternal war, who live in a mythological picture of the world. Haven’t you looked at Vaha from this angle before? By the way, dear reader, if some points seemed familiar to you, then it is not just because they either echo or are directly included in Laura of the first edition of Warhammer 40k. Who knows, maybe this is the canonical canon?
Author of the text: Oleksandr Timofeev. Written with support Timeweb Cloud especially for CatGeek and Habra readers.
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