I hate that awkward feeling having characters you want to write about even more than you have stories for them. So I’m going to talk a bit about some of the characters from long-fics I’ve been working on on and off in the last few months.

At some point while reading Deathwatch anthologies last summer, I started brainstorming my own kill-team. Ah yeah, all-Blackshield misfit team. Because I was bored of reading the same characters over and over and wanted to write people who didn’t fit the same very few Space Marine molds. Because I wanted characters specifically who were older and had been around the block and had chosen to be where they were now, for whatever reasons, rather than naively having never been tempted by anything.

So my kill team: The sergeant, a Fallen Dark Angel, who would prefer to be a loyalist thank you very much. He’s here until it’s time to run again, because those assholes going around inconveniencing him, shouting about atonement, can just die in a fire. A loyalist from a traitor Chapter who spent some centuries as a mercenary outside Imperial space, a long-time character of mine but at significantly older point in his timeline. He has gotten by by making a few very clear lines and never stepping over them no matter what it cost him and by now has his shit together. An ex-Chaos Marine born in the Eye of Terror and made into a Space Marine by some dark Apothecary there, who got bored with fighting over scraps with warband after warband there, and did you know the Inquisition just hands you really nice guns? He is also anachronistically and stereotypically Texan. A trans woman from a Chapter who did not take well to that admission, but has left rather than backed down and seeks to be a good loyalist and not fall to Slaanesh or whatever anyone may say. A gue’vesa spy from a Chapter stranded deep in what became tau space after the Damocles Crusade self-destructed, who had to team up with the tau for survival. The team-up was initially reluctant but over the centuries their recruitment planet has assimilated into tau society and the Space Marines drawn from there have too. A Techmarine who never angsts about being a dreadnought because being a dreadnought is just about the coolest thing. Who wouldn’t want to upgrade their worthless meat-puppet for a gun robot? Anyway, he’s been excommunicated and defrocked by Mars for all manner of tech-heresy and conduct unbecoming and regrets absolutely nothing.

Another story: The adventures of a VIIIth Legion warband from home-world swap AU in the 40k-era. It’s a set of quasi-Chaos Marine adventures but at least as much Inquisition-style adventures. As I write I’ve decided the World Eaters and the Inquisition have this whole interdependent relationship, so that in this AU the Inquisition never achieved the same level of absolute, unconditional power they have in the canon timeline. The World Eaters wander in, kill people of high station who thought their power or connections or whatever within the Imperial institution would protect them, then fuck off again, which means the Inquisition doesn’t need to, which means they never developed the same “above politics” ability to do so to such an extent. It’s also a running joke that Chaos Marines paint their armour like Deathwatch Marines when they want to pass through Imperial space undercover without starting something. Which is turn means whenever real Deathwatch Marines show up on Inquisitorial business, they’re treated with a fair amount of suspicion as maybe loyalists, maybe traitors with good intentions, maybe traitors here to stab you in the back.

Various characters include members of the initial small warband: some Space Marines, some Chapter serfs, and their shared post-revolution Nucerian ideals. There’s also this whole growing plotline around Alexandrina Victoria, a teenaged girl in stolen power-armour who is here to have One Piece-style space adventures with her friends and might be the saviour of the galaxy, accidentally. Everyone treats her like a cute team mascot, up until they treat her like a mascot character who is now the captain. Along with being the lesbian lover of the former leader of the warband, she also bring in the character temporarily named Aristotle, a Thousand Sons Marine who briefly hitches a ride with them who becomes her tutor. There’s also his mind-screwed, Stockholm-syndromed wulfen Space Wolf pet/bodyguard, who Alex “inherits” after his death, since she is a nice girl who likes making friends.

Another story: There is a world that was attacked by tyranids and the Space Marine Chapter who made it their home stood against them. They lost. This is backstory. The actual story follows nine survivors who live in a void station in orbit above a dead world. Three of them had been Space Marine neophytes before, but five of the others have been hastily implanted with geneseeds since, because when all you have is teenagers and a geneseed vault, everything looks like a nail. Exactly one character is over the age of sixteen, a middle-aged prospector who was here to survey the remaining planet for mineral reclamation after the tyranids moved on and has appointed herself everyone’s mother instead. Two of the characters were failed Space Marine aspirants, beginning to get accustomed to life as Chapter serfs, whose constant awareness of their own past failures are major drives to their characters. Another two characters were criminals in storage for servitor conversion, who are prickly and mistrustful of authority and regret only getting caught and taken alive. Even the older kids, the kids who were technically part of the Chapter, barely know anything about it and what it was like in the old days. They weren’t even in Scout armour, let alone inducted into its mysteries. They scavenge, they grow up, they try to get by and claim their futures as Space-Marines-in-potentia. A running theme of the story is that natural talent is all well and good, but it can only get you so far without training or experience.

Anyway, those are the major original character long-fics that have been taking up my time recently, as opposed to the fanfic oneshot that have a chance of actually getting posted on the internet.

Having read through both Dark Imperium and Clonelord in the space of five days (back around when I wrote this), I find myself unable to comment on many aspects of the latter except in the context of the former. But first, a tangent:

I, like many people, first speculated years ago about the return of the primarchs in the 40k-era and what it would be like and how it would go and so on. But in my fantasies and AU writing, I never felt like putting the primarchs at the center of galactic affairs. Oh, they could do some things, but as far as I was concerned their stories were going to have to contain a major component of the galaxy having moved on without them, having moved past them. They could not step into their old places, they could only find a new place, by getting their shit together and then finding a way to make themselves useful on the sidelines.

As I was complaining about previously, a primarch swooping in to effortlessly save the day is just boring. Because really, primarchs are just awful. Whether loyalist or traitor, good or evil, or whatever as people, their very existence breaks the world around them. They’re strong, but it’s often in a way that makes the people around them weak. Sure there’s going on about how they’re inspirational and good for morale, but it’s… too much. They have this nat 20 charisma that turns into a Dominate discipline. They turn the people around them into these hollowed-out sycophants and worshippers, into pawns and children, who worst of all aren’t even doing it from fear or intimidation but from love, and that’s terrifying.

Sure, there are charismatic people in real life, but they take it to a magic extent. People who meet a primarch can’t keep a sentence in their head, we’ve been told over and over since Horus Rising. People who met them twenty minutes ago are jumping to take a bullet for them. Primarchs are willing to admit, looking backwards from the 40k era, that mistakes were made and should be fixed, but what’s to keep them from making the same mistakes again or shiny new ones? A miniscule number of people are capable of arguing with them, let alone changing their minds, let along stopping them from doing the stupid thing they’ve decided on anyway. They don’t have to work for people’s regard, it is a default state that takes immense fortitude or other priorities to avoid.

When primarchs held firm, those around them continued in their shadows. When primarchs fell, those around them fell, 99% of the time (and most of that 1% only did otherwise by being head-over-heels adherents to the Emperor personality cult more strongly than the primarch one). When primarchs went away, everything fell apart in their absence because all the structures around them, both of the Imperium and the Chaos Legions, were based around their existence as a lynch pin, making everyone else dependent on them.

So I found the ending of Clonelord to be satisfying. Not a good thing, not a deserved thing, not that thing that failed to be riddled with flaws from beginning to end, many of which were pointed out outright in the narrative, but understandable. Maybe, yes, necessary, for any good future to be possible in the long run.

Because sure, sometimes you need help. Sometimes you need a push, and sometimes you can’t succeed on your own in digging yourself out of the hole you’re in, especially when that hole is systematic oppression and degradation of people and a culture and civilization over the course of millennia. But the narrative of a savior will only get you so far. People have to chose to save themselves. People have to choose to change their ways and their values and their lives. Other people can help and can change the circumstances around them, but only someone’s own choice will lead to anything but another castle in the sky. (Huh, and now I’m left with a really strong desire to rewatch Revolutionary Girl Utena.)

AU: Super-aging isn’t a thing. Fabius just spends half the book carrying around a baby in a sling, gland-hounds trailing after him with diaper bags. Everyone just accepts this because it’s not even the weirdest thing he’s done this week, and doesn’t ask.

It’s going to be fun when Belisarius Cawl and Fabius Bile get married and have to introduce their kids to each other: “Here is my dog daughter Igori and my daemon bird daughter Melusine” and “Here is my robot son Cawl Junior,” and then they can all sit on the couch and watch all the Jurassic Park movies together.

I think I might have jumped straight from point A to point M or so in my thought process.

And the follow-up: Roboute Guilliman: “Cawl, your definitely-not-an-AI robot is broken. It claims your latest message translates to ‘Got married. Create wedding gift registry at Bloodbath and Beyond.’ Why would you even pre-program that as a possible response? Also it keeps trying to convince me people in this millennia think ‘bubble gum, pre-chewed’ is an appropriate wedding gift. Why do you want this from me? P.S. Just in case you did get married, I have sent you a toaster. You’re welcome.”

I really like the characters in the Fabius Bile books. They are their strongest point, in my opinion, with me wanting to point at half the cast and go “this is my favourite who I love,” and at least some affection the rest of the characters as being interesting and fulfilling a role in the story.

And then there’s Savona, who I have very mixed feelings about. I want to like her. She is, on the surface, exactly a thing I have wanted: a woman who’s a Space Marine-level fighter and leader in a warband and gets to run around in power-armour being a Chaos champion. Unfortunately, there are some show vs. tell divides with her. We’re told she’s an authority figure, but we do not see anyone ever treat her with deference or do what she says. We’ve never seen her win a fight and she backs down from every confrontation she’s been in rather than the other guy. She is continually treated as naive and in need of condescending explanations of how the galaxy works, despite the fact this shouldn’t be her first rodeo. Everyone consistently treats her like shit. She comes across as the quintessential woman “leader” character whose given no respect to show how the other characters are such loose-cannons and conveniently women can’t actually be in charge and men can’t actually defer to them, that’s just how things are and always have been and always will be, right?

So I’m torn between wanting to like a character similar to her but very different in the details of actual portrayal and… just… wishing she wasn’t in the story.

In the style of xkcd, I find mentally substituting random words much improves my Warhammer reading experience. For example:

boltgun -> paintball gun

the Emperor -> a swarm of bees

battle-barge -> party-bus

war -> disco

dreadnought -> dinosaur

centuries -> hours

days -> millennia

primarch -> some friend of a friend who no one had wanted to invite but showed up anyway

lodge -> book club

council -> potluck

Terra -> Tumblr

Mars -> Deviantart

daemons -> kittens

“Guilliman scratched his face thoughtfully. His chin was stubbly. He had neglected his personal grooming these last few days.”–Dark Imperium

The fact that Guilliman can canonically grow facial hair is important to my interests, okay?

I could be totally wrong about this, but I feel like Guy Haley keeps writing the book he wants to write, then his editors send him a note back to add more fight scenes, so he goes back through and adds a couple chapters of bolter porn at the last minute. I say this because these chapters tend to be extremely boring, contribute nothing to the plot that couldn’t be summarised in a single sentence, and be weird flashbacks out of chronological order.

I know I shouldn’t hold this against Dark Imperium, because I know the purpose of the book was to make heart-eyes at Rob, but some aspects of the whole return of the primarchs stuff remind me of one of the many things the Justice League movie did badly. Welp, I guess the rest of humanity is just useless without Superman to swoop in and save the day.

That’s a thing that gets boring fast about Space Marine-centric books whenever they interact with non-Space Marines. Everyone else might as well not exist, or at least should stay in the kitchen and know their own worthlessness, and fuck reading a story about that.

I rolled my eyes so hard when someone was making some comment about Chaos’ lies and promising an easy route to power. What do you think primarchs are? The Emperor spent tens of thousands of years becoming what he was, but couldn’t take that kind of time and trouble to make the generals he needed, so he cheated and stuck a bunch of his own power and possibly Warp magic and mystery chemical X into these new primarchs. Unsurprisingly, they ran around using their cool superpowers without understanding or responsibility and screwed themselves over and fell to Chaos in beginner mistakes. That’s why so many Space Marine novels start with the protagonist as a feral world youth who becomes a Space Marine, so the audience will think of the character as having worked hard and overcome adversity and earned the powers he has in later sections. Because being handed genetic enhancements by some Apothecary and cool weapons and armour by some Martian and power by dint of being willing and able to kill everyone who disagrees with you are of course totally different than being handed cool superpowers by Chaos, because…?

I found myself warming up to Typhus, a character who appears very briefly and I normally neither like nor care about. You go, sassing Mortarion like that. I liked the sheer awkwardness and uncomfortableness of Marneus Calgar’s relationship with Guilliman–not because I want him to turn traitor per se, but I like it being address how much this has messed up his view of himself and his accomplishments and legacy. It made me nostalgicly want to be reading more about Abaddon, Ahriman, Fabius Bile, Erebus, etc. The people who aren’t primarchs but decided to ignore everyone who told them they could never be as cool or accomplished as a result and went out and got shit done. Or loyalist characters from traitor Legions. Or Ciaphas Cain, always.