I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
This episode successfully demonstrates the surprising depth of Warhammer 40,000. This is as aspect of Warhammer that's easy to overlook when you're focusing on just the tabletop games, or video games, or a subset of books. It's easy to think that Warhammer 40k is fiction about big guns and theocratic military campaigns. You might even think that the Imperium are the good guys.
I think you learn about the relativity of "good" pretty early on in Warhammer, or else you put it down and never come back to it. I almost did, after reading the first few books I'd bought. The protagonists in the book were on a literal crusade against an alien species, and the crime of the alien species was that they weren't human. You cannot cheer for that kind of protagonist. So you either put the book down, or you accept that you're engaging with a disturbing and horrific and, unfortunately, apt vision of humanity. You start to look at the story objectively, letting the series of plot events happen much as events happen on the news. You register them, and you catalogue them, and you promise yourself to never echo them. In fact, you do everything in your power, in real life, to embody exactly the opposite of the traits you've seen in this horrible dystopic future.
What's fascinating, though, is that there are no contant protagonists in Warhammer. What's "good" is defined by whatever that story's (or game's) protagonist wants.
In this episode, the protagonists are a band of Aeldari. They're space elves, and I vaguely know they exist from the tabletop games. I have no real experience with them from books, and what I know of their culture comes almost entirely from this episode. In other words, they're strangers to me, and I have no reason to favour them over the ork boyz of the Old Bale Eye episode or the Adepta Sororitas of A Question of Faith, and certainly not the space marines of Angels of Death.
It's worth saying that I'm watching this series ond the Angels of Death series in parallel. I've got 20 or 30 space marine miniatures that I use for tabletop games. I've read lots of books about space marines.
In this episode, the space marines are the antagonists. You're on the Aeldari side in this episode, just as you would be if you brought an Aeldari army or kill team to the tabletop.
I don't really know of any other fiction where you, as the participant, change allegiance so often. Usually, and possibly especially in sci fi, there's a clear good guy and a really obvious bad guy. Often, the baddies are bad because that's the way they were written, and we often have no problem with that. If you didn't know anything more about Warhammer except that it had big beefy dudes in power armour wielding impossibly big guns, it might surprise you that in Warhammer more than any other sci fi universe, the baddies are fully developed characters, full of nuance and contradiction, and they're frighteningly relatable. Sure, that's because there literally are no "good guys". But as Ship Mistress Livia Solken said in Angels of Death, "Who among us are innocent?" That's the true horror of Warhammer 40k, I guess.
This is good sci fi. Sure, it borders on fantasy due to the elves and vision quest style plotline, but it hits its mark and fulfills the old sci fi as a reflection of reality trope. This is a story about aliens who are more human than humans. It's emotional, and tender, and really excellent.
This is great Warhammer 40,000. It's only because of Warhammer's rich lore that the story hits as hard as it does. You admired the space marines yesterday, because you saw a show where they were heroically up against a bunch of disgusting Tyranids. But for this episode, you hate space marines and everything they stand for. I love, as I imagine the authors intended, that this made me question the precious things in my own real life, too, even if only for a few daring moments.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.