Ixion Watches First Blood

Let me get one thing straight: I got the wrong impression of this movie, and of the Rambo character. I had the osmotic impression of a heavily-armed hero, a man of righteous action, delivering justice to the forces of evil in the form of automatic gunfire.

Frankly, I don't know where I got that impression anymore. The film supported it only awkwardly at first, then fell through as we see the poignant sympathy with which the victimized small-town cops are portrayed. Rambo's tearful breakdown at the film's climax smashed that impression like a wrecking ball. This man was not a hero, but a tragic victim-- a living, breathing human being transformed into a weapon and unable to turn himself back.

I find it sad that this character, it now seems, has been so myopically Flanderized into nothing but a scowling, M60-brandishing slab of man-meat, forgetting entirely the powerfully delivered message by the film. I don't know who's fault it is, if it's anyone's-- having not yet seen the later films, it may be that the sequels are themselves to blame. Peering through the foggy glass of the accumulated stereotype overlaid upon the facts, we find ourselves cheering and rooting for the very warlike force that the film so pointedly expresses the bitter tragedy of-- egging on the broken soldier for the gratification of the crowd. It's an uncomfortable feeling, I find.

I liked this movie a lot more than I was expecting to, and for entirely different reasons than I'd anticipated. It took all the guns-blazing action, all the gore and violence, and made it mean something-- the only thing it could realistically mean-- and I love it for that. See it if you haven't. If you have, see it again. It's good stuff.

On the ever effervescent topic of the undead

You know, I just realized something the other day. Zombies are boring.

I can think of three just core purposes for zombies that seem to get used in everything in one capacity or another:

1. Mass numbers of sluggish, mindless targets for spectacularly gory slaughter
2. Widespread disaster creating a chaotic, lawless environment fostering survivor camaraderie and rampant looting
3. Roundabout social commentary on the uniformity of post-industrial society or some such fartsy folderol

Now, there's nothing stopping anybody from taking the concept in other directions, but even the freshest take on the shuffling (or running, or crawling) dead is still spreading perfectly good dressing on a cut of veal dating from the Persian Gulf War-- you can lay it on by the pine box, but it's still old meat, and no amount of thousand island can mask the smell, nor save your dinner guests from nasty stomach bugs.

I think it's representative of a larger problem. Zombies, despite not being a terribly good idea anymore, still seem to have a lot of clout, being a well-understood and accepted staple of video games and movies. But take away their rotting infectious exteriors and slap on some dollar store shades and you're left with generic mooks, no better than humanoid goombas-- not people, but cardboard targets for an actual character to kill en masse without guilt or hesitation (assuming your action hero is an actual character and not just as cardboard as everything else he meets).

So many "action" pieces rely on this by their very nature-- the faceless, soulless nobodies that The Hero fells like so many bottles lined up on a fence. Every video game comes packaged with an infinite supply of them just so the player has something to do, just as every movie provides an ample pile for whenever the writers bow their heads and admit to themselves they're writing "action" and toss in another fight scene. Many works will try to characterize their masses in some way, maybe making them an alien race or magical constructs or amok robots or something dumber than any of those, making up their own rules for them or recycling some existing monstrous mythos, but it's all the same, really.

There is nothing beyond that festering single-celled nucleus to define the zombie, and as a result they can only serve the one function-- cardboard target, even if they're presented as being more menacing in the abstract way and causing some kind of worldwide cataclysm that severs phone connections and downs power lines with its mere existence.

I never got that, either; why is it when zombies invade, suddenly the city looks like its been carpet bombed? There are usually craters and collapsed buildings and unchecked fires and damaged infrastructure. I know it's supposed to suggest collateral damage from people suddenly going all funny in the head during whatever important industrial task they were engaged in at the time, but you'd think the shambling hordes all received C4 charges as free gifts instantly upon zombification.

In conclusion, I'm tired of zombies, but more than that, I'm tired of ready-made slaughterable throngs of uniform bad guys that exist only to get killed with chainsaws duct-taped to lawnmowers or make an implausibly oversized mess for less dead characters to try and worm their way out of through trench camaraderie and the plundering of shopping malls.

And don't even get me started on warrior races.

A Grey Outlook

This article was written based on Warhammer 40,000 Codex: Grey Knights 5th Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Codex: Daemonhunters 3rd Edition.

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Imagine that if in Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles, everyone on the French front was fighting and dying at Bingo Crepescule-- except for Manech and his comrades, who all had full modern-day flak armor and miniguns, decimating the German line and then vanishing into thin air. And then the rest of the regiment was sent to the firing squad for having even seen it at all.

That's the Grey Knights.

Warhammer 40,000 is known for extremes, mess-making and sometimes outright shameless stupidity for fun's sake, but the GKs are playing an entirely different game, one in which only they matter. To enjoy Space Marines, one must believe that their conflicts have some effect, however minor and however temporary. The Grey Knights hog that spotlight, devaluing the efforts of lesser factions, a power-armored finger in every pot. What makes it even worse is that there is nary a trace of the Grey Knights' influence on the world; they're fighting the Most Important Battles in the Universe, but win or lose, nothing changes for better or worse. Granted, that's a problem the setting suffers from in general, but the Grey Knights are an especially pronounced example of it in action.

Let us reflect for a moment upon the Warhammer 40,000 fandom's frequent hatred of Matthew Ward. This is something I knew about going in when I first got a look at the Grey Knights 5th edition codex. I'd heard the stories, the anecdotes and of course the fathomless, thrumbling fanrage. A part of me gave it credence and another part didn't; my expectations for it weren't high, and ultimately I just wanted to see if it really was as bad as I'd heard.

Not halfway through the fluff I found myself disgusted, my tongue curled in tangible revulsion at the contents. Here lies the bad fanfic, the enthused but callow young fan, not yet jaded or seasoned, absorbed in the forming opulence of his precious custom Space Marines made all by him. They have all the best, and ignore the worst. This is the inability to not see the whole picture, to myopically emphasize only this new thing and to forget that there was ever a setting beyond the pieces that are useful in that thing's decoration. The setting and that thing do not need one another.

Now, I want to be entirely clear on this. I have read both Grey Knights 5th and Daemonhunters 3rd. While the inclination to blame Ward came strong at first from the reading of the former, perusal of the latter dispelled the notion of his sole blame. Daemonhunters 3rd edition is as bad and perhaps even worse than the 5th edition army book, and Matt Ward's name does not appear in its credits; DH 3rd features almost exactly the same fluff, sometimes almost to the word as GK 5th, so ultimately I can't pin this one on Ward-- they really were this bad, right out of the hexagrammic gate.

That said, Ward still wrote the Bloodtide event in GK 5th, so he's not getting off clean. More on that later.

Let's take the rest by point.

The Grey Knights:

- have all the best equipment.
Where other Chapters have very few suits of Terminator armor, usually just enough to outfit the 1st Company properly, almost the entire Grey Knights Chapter consists of Terminators. They all have Nemesis Force weapons, which are like normal force weapons, but better. Every single one of them has a storm bolter. Every single one of them has a copy of the Liber Daemonica.

- have tons and tons of incredibly rare and world-shakingly important artifacts and relics.
A book containing everything there is to know on daemons. A vial of the Emperor's tears. The biggest evil in the known universe entombed on their fortress-world. The Terminus Decree.

- are all psykers and sorcerers, but never suffer any ill effects from either.
This more than anything speaks to the shameless Sueness of the Grey Knights. It, and by extension their immunity to Chaos corruption, effectively breaks the setting.

- are, without question, "better" than all other Space Marines.

There's just something about the Grey Knights that rubs me the wrong way. Compare to the Ultramarines, who are oft accused of being the subjects of fanwank, or the Blood Angels, or less-talked about chapters like the Imperial Fists or Salamanders, or any of the tens of nobody Chapters, or even Space Marines as a whole. No one of those gets hyped this bad.

The problem with this kind of self-oneupsmanship is that every iteration reduces the value of what came before, and in order to hold the note, something else must inevitably replace the replacement, creating an ever-growing upside-down pyramid of excess only for the sake of pushing the limits.

Do they get the joke? Have they forgotten the joke? Are they the joke? It's hard to say for sure. If they are the joke, they have no punchline, at least not yet. But if they did, I could let the matter drop, as they would suddenly make sense. It would take something deprecating to take the hot air out of them-- like some or all of their Super Powerful Artifacts of Vagueness being useless trinkets, and this being the reason they don't let anyone see them.

Consider the way in which the Crimson Fists once one-shotted half of their Chapter by putting in the wrong coordinates for a missile. It's a tragedy with comic roots; black humor of the kind Warhammer 40,000 understands and has ample room for.
The problem is Space Marines, who are actually kind of hard to find funny. And it doesn't help that GW keeps trying to depict them as more and more flawless. They would make excellent pompous fall-guys, but that doesn't seem to be how it goes.

If you can enjoy them on face value, the up-to-elevenness of Warhammer 40,000 just makes it cooler. I can understand this; I've felt it myself. There are some days when I really can believe that The Emperor Protects. But sometimes believing that makes it too hard to stomach certain other parts of the setting, which are too bad to be fun for anyone. Some parts I can enjoy unironically. Other parts have to be a joke for me because otherwise they're no fun, or even actively depressing. They Grey Knights don't fit into this; they're a bad part that needs to be a joke, but refuses to do so.

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Let's talk about 876.M41: The Bloodtide Returns. In the now-infamous battle writeup from Grey Knights 5th, and the root of much fanrage.

Taking out the part where some of the Sisters are corrupted on contact would help. Have them fight and die in a straight combat against demonic enemies, and have their martyrdom become the talisman of protection. Having a Sister around to offer the Grey Knights their blood as a blessing would help too, so it's not just "hey a bunch of dead Sisters lets take all the blood". Turn it from just a bunch of senseless gory death into a meaningful sacrifice.
And give the Sisters their due credit, since without them and their sacrifice, victory against the Bloodtide would have been impossible for the Grey Knights.

Then there's the fact that they didn't consent to this. The Sisters didn't commit any sins (beyond being abstractly "corrupted" by the Bloodtide) or otherwise do anything objectionable to the Grey Knights-- In fact, it says specifically that their "innocent" blood is what helped. But, just for the sake of their own protection, they butcher them all down to the last and paint themselves in the blood.

It's a fairly unique instance of allied Imperial forces turning against one another where one is helpless to defend itself from the other, and made worse by both being among the holiest and most faithful of all Imperial factions.

It's not that unique for the GKs. Yes, they do kill loads of people to purge daemons, but at least there they can say "we had a reason, there was a daemon there... probably". The Bloodtide incident doesn't even have that. There's no precedent for Sister blood-- or anyone else's blood, for that matter, conferring protection, they never needed this kind of protection before besides, and then they go about obtaining this blood in the most violent and shameless manner possible against a weakened and helpless ally.

That, and the way they don't permit anyone to live after seeing them (at least without some mind-wiping.) Killing friendly units is practically their way of saying hello. But even then, they don't kill those that see them themselves. The Inquisition makes the judgement and then carries out the deed-- and even then, sometimes mind-wiping is an option rather than death.

So what are you trying to tell me, Grey Knights Codex? That the other Chapters are just chopped liver? That the Grey Knights alone bear the true burden of protecting the Imperium from destruction, without which nobody else would last half a minute? It's very nearly impossible to overemphasize the importance and grandeur the Grey Knights claim, at the direct expense of every other Imperial institution.

The core reason I don't like them is because they're overhyped Sues, but as Space Marines they're only the worst instance of an entire faction of overhyped Sues. In conclusion, I would say that if the setting must have Space Marines at all, and I figure it does, the usual batches serve well enough. A Super-Chapter of Super Space Marines is about as necessary as Godzilla becoming Super Godzilla; the original design was plenty for its role.

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Some Selected Quotations.

" At the core of the Daemonhunters army is a collection of elite and incredibly skilled individuals who excel in every battlefield role. Even the lowest ranks of the Grey Knights are the equal of the strongest units of other armies. grey Knights exceptionally well equipped, meaning both their ranged and close combat capabilities far outstrip those of their brother Space Marines. "
- Daemonhunters Codex, 3rd Edition

This sums them up pretty well, I think.

" Such dedication is necessary if the grey Knights are to stand against the horrors of the Warp and, to date, such precautions have proven to be effective as not a single Grey Knight has faltered in battle or turned to Chaos. "
- Daemonhunters Codex, 3rd Edition

God, I hate that line.

" In aspect, a Purgation Squad appears little different to the Devastator Squads employed by more conventional Space Marine Chapters. In doctrine, however, the two are markedly different. In most Chapters, duty in a Devastator Squads is seen as an excellent opportunity for a new recruit to experience the sights and sounds of a battlefield. Not so in the Grey Knights. The weaponry wielded by a Purgation Squad is twice as deadly, a hundred times rarer and ten thousand times more valuable than the more commonplace armaments carried by Space Marine Devastators. "
- Grey Knights 5th Edition

That doesn't even begin to make sense, in a bad way.

" To pursue the endless war against the Daemons of Chaos takes more than a mere Space Marine. It takes a Grey Knight-- an altogether more difficile warrior, who is as far above other Space Marines as the Space Marines are above the common run of humanity. "
- Grey Knights Codex 5th Edition

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/difficile