\n\n\n\n\n\nI always knew Games Workshop was British, and the Warhammer Fantasy factions were obvious mappings of medieval protonations, but it\u2019s 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 \u201cBritish\u201d faction is\u2026 the Orks. Their dumb, violent, and happy warband culture is some straight hooligan/casual/skinhead shit, and the \u201crun shirtless into battle wielding crap, it\u2019ll work because we believe enough in the magic paint we slapped on everything\u201d is maximum Celt.
(\u2018Course not all the factions are that resonant, especially the more recent cash-in ones. The Eldar are just Tolkein elves\u2026 in space! The Necrons are mummies\u2026 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\u2019s a little curious how the \u201cNazi\u201d and \u201cRed Army\u201d 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\u2019s the human side. I\u2019m sure I\u2019m not the first one to note that the whole effect is awfully rightist, though I suppose that\u2019s why it fits in so well with the nerd right-populism of the \u2018chans (as I like to think of it, \u201cwaifus, warhammer, and white nationalism\u201d).I think you\u2019re going too hard with the round pegs and square holes thing. Most of the Imperial guard is \u201cX country, but too much, and in space\u201d and the rest are nits and bits of different places stuck onto various fantasy tropes.
\nOn top of that, if you actually browse /pol/, you\u2019ll see that they don\u2019t actually do space marine larp as much as they just jump to Crusades propaganda.
\n
HERESY
"}