I always knew Games Workshop was British, and the Warhammer Fantasy factions were obvious mappings of medieval protonations, but...
I always knew Games Workshop was British, and the Warhammer Fantasy factions were obvious mappings of medieval protonations, but it’s only recently struck me how much the W40K factions are mappings of forces from the more modern British imaginary.
Like, the Space Marines obviously take the place of the German war machine of WWII - technologically superior, purity-obsessed totenkopf ubermenchen, defeatable mostly by virtue of not being able to field enough expensive units. The Imperial Guard is the Red Army - tanks, tanks, masses of human-wave infantry, tanks, and ruthless commissars holding things together by executing their own troops.
A more interesting thing is how the “British” faction is… the Orks. Their dumb, violent, and happy warband culture is some straight hooligan/casual/skinhead shit, and the “run shirtless into battle wielding crap, it’ll work because we believe enough in the magic paint we slapped on everything” is maximum Celt.
(‘Course not all the factions are that resonant, especially the more recent cash-in ones. The Eldar are just Tolkein elves… in space! The Necrons are mummies… in space! The Tyranids are LOLGIGER, the Sisters of Battle are LOLNUNS. For a culture with an actual chaos magic tradition, the Chaos forces are pretty simplistic drawn-on-binder horn-throwing WOO METAL. The Tau are what, Japan? Maaaaybe nonaligned Scandanavian Social Democrats if you squint, but honestly screw the Tau.)
In this schema it’s a little curious how the “Nazi” and “Red Army” forces are fundamentally on the same side, though when you add in the wash of Popery I guess it makes sense as a unified British vision of the Totalitarian Other. Which makes it a little amusing that that’s the human side. I’m sure I’m not the first one to note that the whole effect is awfully rightist, though I suppose that’s why it fits in so well with the nerd right-populism of the ‘chans (as I like to think of it, “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism”).I think you’re going too hard with the round pegs and square holes thing. Most of the Imperial guard is “X country, but too much, and in space” and the rest are nits and bits of different places stuck onto various fantasy tropes.
On top of that, if you actually browse /pol/, you’ll see that they don’t actually do space marine larp as much as they just jump to Crusades propaganda.
HERESY