Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
On the Imperium:
"The Imperium is one of many cathartic dark fantasy statements about the hideousness of contemporary reality: it channels a conviction that our world, this neoliberal and imperial capitalist dog's dinner, is not in fact the height of progress, but fundamentally awful and only getting worse."
On the appeal of the Space Marine fantasy:
'The appeal of the Space Marine fantasy is that it takes the alienation, misogyny and misery of being "man-made" and flips it into a rigid gasmask of pride and belonging, of indestructible and unquestioning purpose. In return for all the mutilations it deals and expects, it promises calm and some degree of togetherness - and this is why it doesn't really operate, in the bulk of Warhammer 40,000 art I've encountered, as parody or satire.'
On what Sontag says about fascism:
'It's dangerous, Sontag says, to reduce fascism to "brutishness and terror". Fascism survives because it offers things to aspire to - in Sontag's summary, "the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community". These are relatively innocuous values and emotions that may also appear in, say, rock music, in superhero stories, at wargaming tournaments and sports events, and in earnest game developer paeans to "absolute brotherhood and sacrifice".'
On masculinity :
"I'm not immune to this hellish daydream. It's a carnival mirrorshow for all the tackly little aggressions and humiliations of my own upbringing. I understand my own masculinity as a wound that is slowly healing, and which is reopened periodically by the experience of art that cultivates the old patriarchal frenzy. I find Warhammer 40,000's Imperium freeing, as a magnification of the grinding stupidity of patriarchy, but I also feel the pull of these warty stereotypes. I look at the thunderously daft trailer for Relic's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War 3 and, silly as it sounds, I tear up a little, because I see in the smiling face of the doomed Marine the sheer absence of fear my older male conditioning has always demanded, and never permitted..."
