Deepkin

Interesting. Well, different strokes eh? To me they look a lot like the old Ian Miller art, which I love. Overbuilt baroque ****** with leering faces and random bits and bobs is my favorite aesthetic though, so perhaps I am predisposed towards being the perfect audience for these minis lol

Those new chaos legionaries are perfect. Absolutely my favorite new chaos models, and possibly my favorite from GW in a long time.

Love the warcry terrain. Warbands are alright, just wish Hashut ones were chorfs man. Witch Hunter warband is so so. Not nearly enough crazy religious paraphernalia IMO. I like the bomb crossbow and the pups the best. Will get it for them alone. Have a million witch Hunter models I can proxy for everyone else.

You're certainly allowed to be upset. I was upset when they introduced Primaris, when they made Custodes into Marines +1, when they killed the Old World, when Josh Reynolds left BL, etc. Either you adjust to the new lore and make something of it, or you leave. I have been told that holding onto the old lore and complaining when it's changed is a certified Bad Thing. But hey, I get it. It sucks when something you like gets changed into something you don't like. I sympathize.

If the lore changes and you do not want to change with it, then what can be done? Such is progress.

You can always make your own background. Isn't that one of the joys of the Warhammer universe? If you think the current background is morally reprehensible, write your own that contains the level of moral didacticism you deem appropriate. Who knows? Write it well enough, and perhaps GW will incorporate it in their own.

Yeah the Empire is just a moderately exaggerated Holy Roman (Holy Sigmarites?) Empire. Honestly, parts of it are probably toned down from real life (women have far more agency in the Empire than they did in real life at that time and place, for example. And it's explicitly polytheistic rather than the aggressive monotheism of real life). Still grimdark, but not as pitch black as the Imperium.

The imperium isn't fascist, it's a theocratic feudal society in space. Still a monstrous society, but not fascist. That there are protagonists from this society doesn't make it propaganda. Or is Game of Thrones propaganda for pseudo-medieval feudalism as well? Is Gideon the Ninth propaganda for interstellar necromantic theocracy? Etc. Depiction isn't endorsement. The Imperium is widely depicted (still) as the worst regime imaginable. It's so terribly conservative and dogmatic, it's starships use slave gangs to load weapons instead of autoloaders (a technology we have now). It stacks person on person into cancer-ridden, horror-mountains and calls them "hive cities." It works planets to death and then uses their corpses as mulch for farming. It births children, kills them and resurrects their corpses as flying servitors for...aesthetic reasons? It takes little boys, pumps them full of hormones and literal hypnotic indoctrination, tells them they're gods Angels of death and then unleashes them upon the galaxy...who then routinely go mad and betray their Imperium and become it's direst foes. Even when they don't, they routinely genocide their own populations, etc. All this stuff is still in the background. Foregrounded, even. If you think any of that is meant to make you identify with the faction, then I don't know what to say. I think the background still does what it always did: takes the hellish results of absolute conservatism and faith to their obvious, awful conclusions. That there are still sympathetic characters heightens the irony and tragedy. Their individual morality changes nothing: they work within a doomed system, doomed from it's inception by the hubris of it's founder.

Edit: too aggressive in tone, my apologies. Nonetheless, I disagree 40k constitutes fascist propaganda.

No. Not even close. The idea that an author's work represents that authors views IRL is ridiculous and myopic. Authors write things to make a reader feel something. Not to replicate their worldview. If that were so, then every GW author would be a genocidal maniac. And that's just not the case. some authors might write something that is a replication of their worldview, some of the time. But trying to draw a 1:1 link between what a FICTION author creates in their art, and what they truly believe, is generally a fool's errand. Depiction is not endorsement.

See, you think that, but it's actually a corpse on a Primaris lieutenant's tactical rock Could see it being one of the Malerion elves rumored for Underworlds though, or maybe a character for the Cursed City expacs?

I kinda like the Idoneth hero. I mean, not enough to buy the whole box of already ****** models for it. But, like, I would but it off someone for $15 a couple months later, maybe.

Do you think depictions of medieval knights also need to stress their negative characteristics? What about depictions of war in general? Depictions of revolution? What about depictions of organized religion, or depictions of state-enforced atheism? In other words: does depiction equal endorsement? Also: does something being cool mean it's endorsed? Darth Vader looks cool and is cool, but is still the villain. Chaos looks cool in all its incarnation, yet still the villain. Dwarfs look cool, and yet veer between arch-conservative patriarchies fueled by racism and culturally-lauded hatreds who proudly genocide their enemies based on oft-spurious slights to steampunk mega-capitalists. And they're still good guys. Do you find them as terrible as space Marines?

I dunno. Space Marines are cool. You can write a book about cool space monk knights being cool and it's not a glorification of space fascists. It's a book about cool space monk knights.

Just run the Warcry warbands as marauders I say. They already fudge all the different weapons into "blah blah weapons of various mights" so ****** it.