I was the target audience for the original Star Wars. Or at least, I was the audience the movies found. I've heard from slightly older friends of mine that they saw the original Star Wars (it wasn't called "A New Hope" or even "Episode IV" then) when they were teens. I wasn't old enough to see the original, but I have a vague memory of seeing Return of the Jedi in a theatre. My point is, I really liked Star Wars, and I still do. I think the way the Star Wars universe is finally expanding is exciting for its fans. Lately, something else has taken its place for me, though, and I'm actually really glad, because it turns out I needed it, even though I didn't realise it.
Relationships are complicated, and I kinda took a detour at Splinter of the Mind's Eye and never really recovered. It's not that I care one way or another about Star Wars. I'm just not interested in it now. Somehow, it wasn't able to retain my interest once I'd read Dune and the John Carter series, and definitely not through the prequels and sequels. I don't mind having lost interest, but I do recognise that now that there was a void where a fictional universe used to be.
(Maybe "void" is melodramatic. There's an open slot for a new fictional scifi universe to occupy my thoughts.)
And that universe, for me, has been Warhammer 40,000 lately. Why? I have five good reasons.
The fascist empires of both Star Wars and Warhammer are based on evil. The dark forces of both universes are founded on lies, manipulation, exploitation, oppression, and all the bad things. And while an Empire falling in real life is good, it's really really bad for a fictional universe. A lot of the most satisfying fiction is based on conflict. It's kind of a cheap thrill, and I wouldn't want all my fiction to be based on conflict, but there's room for that within my scifi diet.
The original Star Wars didn't know it was going to have a sequel, much less several decades of culturally-defining success, so in the first movie there's the implication that the evil Empire is defeated. Obviously in the second movie it's revealed that what they meant to say was that just one space base was defeated, and the rest of the Empire is still going strong. And then at the end of the third movie, the Empire is resoundingly defeated. But then 30 years later, awkwardly, a thing that looks exactly like the Empire pops up and has to be defeated all over again.
In Warhammer, the Imperium of Man is just built in to the setting. It changes over time, between the Horus Heresy and 40k, but no matter what it persists. And unless Games Workshop's story forge loses their grip on unreality, it presumably will persist for as long as the Warhammer scifi universe does.
As a kid, I loved the way the Chaotic Good Luke Skywalker and the Neutral Han Solo was juxtaposed against the Lawful Evil of Darth Vader and the Empire. As an adult, I've learned that there's a lot of complexity in the real world, and I've come to appreciate the occasional fictional universe that reflects that in some way.
Warhammer provides a pretty drastic view of modern complexity, but it's hard not to laugh in both horror and recognition at a setting in which the God Emperor of humanity consumes thousands of human souls in order to stay alive in his catatonic state. It's so resonant that you can't quite tell whether it's too on the nose, or so subtly brilliant that it's lost on too much of the audience.
There really is no good or evil in 40k. There's a struggle between order and chaos, there are clashes of faith, there's fear and suspicion and politick. You might find some level of good in a character, but you're likely to find a measure of evil there, too. In their defense, it's unavoidable in a world like Warhammer, just as it is in our own. You do something to try to save the rainforests, or to spare a child from hard labour in a sweat shop in some far-away country, only to be told that what you've done is detrimental to an endangered species. It's a hypermodern morality puzzle, and you'll never unravel it. Your knight in shining space armour in somebody else's nightmare.
In Star Wars, the Force is so poorly defined that it probably ought to just show Jedi Knights rolling dice for a chance to succeed. I'm referencing gambling, here, not a tabletop RPG because magic in D&D and Starfinder and every other RPG I've ever played is far better defined than the Force.
In Warhammer, space magic comes from something called the Warp. The Warp is a kind of alternate dimension that's home to chaotic daemonic forces. Powers that come from the Warp aren't necessarily perfectly defined, in the sense that it's space magic. Anything is possible when the book or game demands it. However, Warhammer is a game and its magic system benefits from that. There is a lot of definition around what the Warp can do, because you can't just tell players to make stuff up, and hope they play fair.
I don't know why the authors of Star Wars continue to insist on pretending that there's a system to the Force. I feel like the original films did treat the Force as being based entirely on Faith. Sure, it required discipline and focus, but there was no notion that there were Younglings and Padawans training under highly structured pedogogies.
The Warp of Warhammer isn't written to be structured and organised. In fact, it's alternatively called Chaos. There's no structure to it by definition. There are several dark gods who dwell in the Warp, and so the effects of the Warp might be different depending on which god is providing the power. So there's enough structure for it to resonate with the reader's desire for taxonomy and consistency, but really it's space magic. When a book needs something outrageous to happen, the Warp provides. And it most importantly, it makes sense even when it's out of the ordinary.
My core complaint about Star Wars is that its universe is comically small. The writers say it's big, and there is a lot of media out there, but the bulk of it seems to keep featuring the same characters or at least their lineage.
The universe of Warhammer is supposed to be big, too, and the amount of media around it probably rivals Star Wars. Amazingly, it's really hard to revisit your favourite characters from book to book. Sometimes there are characters in one book or video game that I think could have been swapped out with some other character, just for a sense of familiarity. But instead you get new characters, and you learn to love or hate them or both, and then they're gone again.
Just like what happens in real life, in your own city or state or country or planet (all of which are smaller than a universe).
The original Star Wars set up a singular story model. A scrappy band of unlikely friends go up against an impossibly giant evil force, and the good guys win! Except for a wee while in the middle, when something bad happens and things look dire. But then the good guys definitely win!
It's formula can't and shouldn't be broken. But I find Star Wars a little predictable, or with the latest shows, predictably unpredictable and yet ultimately still predictable. I frankly wouldn't want to watch a Star Wars where the tone shifts to a grim dark future [past], but that doesn't mean I want to invest time and energy into what Star Wars does offer.
There's no win condition in Warhammer. Well, actually there are several, in the game, but those are just battles and skirmishes. In the Warhammer universe, even when you win you get virus bombed by your own spaceship because now you've seen too much. The Imperium and all its enemies are locked in an eternal struggle. There's no band of plucky heroes moving in to dismantle the Imperium, and even literally legions of Space Marines haven't been able to subdue the myriad xenos races hungering to destroy humanity.
Stories in Warhammer aren't good against evil. They're generally not about the underdog who manages to overcome impossible odds. The underdogs are on craftworlds and forgeworlds working to supply the military, the baddies are busy stealing those supplies, and the heroes are busy killing innocent civilians. Warhammer is miserable. At best a story arc is about a small personal victory, but even that's probably illegal and after you look away from the story the protagonist probably got erased by the Inquisition.
As always, I know Warhammer isn't for everyone, and I'm not blind to why some people might prefer the constantly renewing hope of Star Wars. But I'm a horror fan, I'm a scifi fan, and Warhammer delivers a satisfyingly bleak reflection of reality that speaks volumes for me.
I'm not actually trying to pit Star Wars against Warhammer 40,000. They're fictional. You can like them both. I know this.
But I think about Star Wars a lot, largely out of habit, and I think a lot about Warhammer. They were bound to get compared eventually. I'm particular about what Star Wars I like, and I'll probably some day be particular about what Warhammer I like, but for now I'm a scifi geek who really appreciates the grim friction of 40k.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.