plot V setting

[The Last Lamenter]

A respected Chapter Master of this Forum made an interesting comment that it was important to remember that 40k is a setting not a story. It is merely a place where WE tell the stories. First, Warhammer has become a distinct entity apart from the game, and second, not only is this guy so wrong that it borders on heresy, his arrogance spits in the face of every author and fan the Black Library has ever had. Drawing this bloody distinction with semantics is tedious to the point of comparision to standing in line at the DMV, And yes, I am do feel that some reductio ad absurdum is necessary in this case; saying 40k is not a story is like saying the Greek Pantheon is just a backdrop for the Illiad or the Odyssey. And if WE are the directors of the 40k universe, then why is there a standard for canonization of lore? There is a certain standard that must be met to contribute to the universe, that which is not is fan fiction and not part of the timeline. What you do at your local game shop does not affect the storyline as per the BB. Even the broad story follows a traditional story arc. Which I can map out for you if you still want to argue, but when you say that it is only a setting, it is dismissive of the work of art we’ve been given; there is no humility or gratitude with such arrogance. Give the Black Library its due. It’s like saying Middle Earth is just a setting for us to play our little war games on, as if Tolkien spent his whole life constructing multiple languages, and family trees, and stories, so that a handful of cosplay nerds could geek out over some dice. Just because some guys decided to have an extra-canonical conflict between the sisters of battle and the 501st Cadian doesn’t make it an official event. LOTR is a setting for games workshop, but he didn’t write his stories for your games to dictate the direction of his story. Are we really so self-important to think that we are all that involved in Blanche’s art work or Abnett’s next book? No, there are guys with good taste at the top calling the shots and thank God too based on some of the human waste-lands I’ve seen at local game shops. And, in case you’ve not noticed, with A Thousand Sons making it on the NY Times Bestseller list, the universe has taken a life of its own apart from the game. Popular vote will never dictate canonization, qualified authors will do that, because if they didn’t, if the typical gamer was calling the shots, the Astartes would be bedding Inquisitors in some awful fanboy’s fantasy and you’d have Warhammer/Twilight crossovers.

[YorkNecromancer]

Okay, I'm not really sure what you're angry at.

You need to structure things like this so that your arguments come across clearly. Insofar as I can tell, you are affronted mostly one person's (IMO perfectly valid) idea that the continuity of the Black Library novels and related materials is treated as less important than the game. You regard the "story" of the 40K universe as of more importance than this unnamed critic suggests.

If this is indeed the case, let me suggest to you that you need to take a step back and consider the Games Workshop point of view: 40K is not a story or a game or a setting. It is an intellectual property. It is a tool that is used to sell products, from BL books to styrene models. It is about making money and that is all. A slavish devotion to the nonsensical idea of "continuity" would not benefit the company, as it would quickly create continuity lockout that would make an already insanely complicated hobby next to impossible for newcomers to enjoy. And I'm not sorry to point out that newcomers are where the money is. No business that wants to succeed should cater to their hardcore fans to the exclusion of all else. Those hardcore fans will stay regardless - that's why they call themselves "hardcore fans". They'll moan like crazy, but that doesn't mean they're any more right than any noisy, obnoxious faction.

(Oh, and you should read [url]http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ContinuityLockOut[/url] for a little more info on the problems of continuity)

What different people will pay for varies upon their personal interest. Some of us love the models, but hate the BL books (I am amongst these - I would not wish 40K war porn on my worst enemy.) That doesn't mean, however, that other people are wrong for loving BL. My friend, let's call him Tyrion (because he's a shorter gentleman and awesome like his codename here) loves BL with all his heart, has met Dan Abnett and fanboyed in the most gentlemanly way you can imagine.

Not that you should, of course.

Now, Tyrion and I are at polar opposites when it comes to 40K. He loves the setting and stories, but doesn't care for the models. So who is right? Neither and both.

40K is not yours. It's not mine, or Tyrion's, or your nameless oppressors. It's all of ours, and as a multimedia-based intellectual property, it's capable of being many things.

I invite you to consider that you are being unhelpfully negative. You love the stories? Great: why not wax lyrical about them? Giving those of us who despise them well reasoned arguments as to why we are wrong makes the world a better place, because you are sharing your enthusiasm and expertise with the world.

As it is, you're trying to make 40K into one thing - the thing it is in your head - and it's not that. It's a shared space, and all things to all of us.

if the typical gamer was calling the shots, the Astartes would be bedding Inquisitors in some awful fanboy’s fantasy and you’d have Warhammer/Twilight crossovers.

And what's wrong with that? Your tastes are not mine or anyone else's. I'm not going to defend Twilight (or fanfiction in general) but if people enjoy it, who am I to tell them they're wrong? Someone quite arrogant, I would say.

Your "horrifying" example might well be "against the fluff", but that only matters to people who care about the sanctity of totally fictional fluff over a good story. If the story is good, it can make whatever changes to the fluff it likes (Batman Begins' interpretation of Ras Al Ghul being an excellent example - goes against the fluff, but is arguably all the better for it). If people want to write fanfiction with Marines bedding Inquisitors, female marines, Eldar and Ork love stories (actually that one sounds like it would be hilarious) let them. You don't have to read them after all!

[The Last Lamenter]

Give me a day or two to get back to you.

[Nabterayl]

I'm not sure which person you're referring to, but as somebody who semi-frequently tells people that "40K is not a story" and "40K is a setting," I can elaborate on what I mean by that.

York put it well, I think, when he called 40K a multimedia intellectual property. I don't know about the person who hacked you off so, but when I say "40K is a setting," what I mean is that the one thing that ties together every 40K product, from a mere transfer sheet to the Horus Heresy series, is its participation in the setting - that is to say, the whole thing. Every word that Games Workshop publishes about 40K, every piece of two- and three-dimensional art, every audio book, every licensed videogame, the history of retcons, all of it - that is the "40K setting," at least as I use the term.

When I (again, speaking for myself and not your nemesis) say that "40K is not a story," I mean to express two ideas. The first is that 40K is bigger than stories. It contains stories, to be sure, and those stories sometimes (perhaps even most of the time, though I couldn't say for sure) inform the other media in which 40K as a whole exists. But a model is not a story. A transfer sheet is not a story. A piece of Blanche artwork is not a story. A game of 40K is not a story. Any of those things can be inspired by and/or inspire stories (and in my opinion are often best when they are and do), but they are not themselves stories. Neither, as York rightly points out, are they 40K. 40K is the thing that encompasses all those things and the stories.

The second idea I mean to express when I say that "40K is not a story" is that the universe of published writings about 40K is not meant to be a single narrative. Some fictional universes more or less do tell a single story - BattleTech and Star Wars come to mind. If you read every Star Wars novel in chronological order, you will (more or less) read the saga of the rise and fall of the Republic, the Galactic Civil War, and the rise and fall of the New Republic. Some novels are tied to that narrative very closely, others very tenuously, but they all more or less relate. 40K doesn't work that way. There is no single narrative thread that runs through every 40K novel. Every 40K novel (in my opinion; I know some disagree about this) informs our understanding of 40K as a whole, but they aren't all telling a story. They are telling multiple stories. The Eisenhorn, Ravenor, and Bequin trilogies tell one story. The Gaunt's Ghosts novels tell an entirely different story, even though they are set close to the inquisitor stories in space and sometimes reference characters in those stories. The Cain novels tell yet a third story, the Heresy a fourth, the Ultramarines novels a fifth, the Blood Angels novels a sixth, the Faith and Fire novels a seventh, and so on.

A consequence of being a bunch of stories that exist in parallel rather than series is that the various 40K stories aren't all going to some end. I have a friend who, perhaps like "Tyrion," is interested in 40K story-wise but not game-wise. He often asks me who will "win," and when the story will "advance." I feel pretty confident in saying that nobody will win, at least not in anything that GW publishes - GW is never going to tell the story of how the Imperium finally exterminates all xenos and mankind successfully evolves into a race of stable-yet-powerful psykers (a "win" for the Imperium), how the eldar/Tau/necrons conquer the galaxy (a "win" for them), how the tyranids convert every gram of biomass in the galaxy into more tyranids (a "win" for them), etc. I'm also pretty confident in saying that GW is not, at present, interested in saying "what happens next" - for instance, not interested in saying what happens to Abaddon after the 13th Black Crusade, to Ghazghkul after the Third War for Armageddon, to the Emperor and the Imperium when the Golden Throne finally fails. I don't think those things (and others like them) are meant to be plot elements whose significance will be revealed in later stories (although they may eventually be used for that). I think they're meant to be pieces of flavor, story hooks - significant pieces of background. This is a major difference from some other universes. FASA told us the story of what happened to the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere and to the Clans of Kerensky. Lucasarts told us the story of what happened to the First Galactic Empire, and to the New Republic. Those stories "advanced," and continue to advance - which they can do because those universes are governed by a single meta-narrative. 40K isn't. It has meta-narratives, but it has more than one - and thus I say "40K is not a story."

[The Last Lamenter]

I can get with that, when you put it that way.