A remaster of the 2011 game, “Warhammer 40K: Space Marine” has come out as the “Master Crafted Edition” and while I was playing through it, I kept thinking about the Warhammer fanbase and the wide range of reactions that the Imperium elicits.

If you’ve never been exposed to something from the vast media empire that is Warhammer/40K, then the gist of the setting is as follows. In the 41st millennium, everything is screwed and the galaxy is an enormous battlefield for its factions to wage never-ending war in. Humanity has been ravaged by conflict, and its main military force exists as the Imperium of Man

This Imperium worships its emperor as God, and the entire faction is mired in superstition and blind zealotry. The ironic thing is that the Emperor, who is basically a corpse in stasis, hated organized religion and would punish those who worshiped him as a god. Now he has no choice but to be a symbol of divinity to the masses.

Most of the adapted books and games that are based in the universe are from the perspective of the Imperium, and so their rhetoric and beliefs are the ones with which fans have the most experience with. Like “Starship Troopers,” these stories depict a society that has become extremely militarized, and for the Imperium, religion and war are inseparable.

The friction comes in when the fanbase takes this ironic rhetoric too close to heart. I’m not talking about the moments when people are having a good time playing a game and screaming stuff like “For the Emperor!” or “Faith is my shield!”, that’s just wacky fun. I’m talking about certain fans getting serious about the idea of “genetic purity” or not understanding that living in an autocratic military society isn’t the best thing to strive for.

For the latter, that topic is a little more recent. Here comes some more lore. Because the Imperium worships their Emperor so deeply, it would be natural that they would start to use technology to replicate him. I’m not privy to the specifics, but basically, the top leaders of the hulking Space Marines in the Imperium are those who have been cloned from the Emperor’s DNA. This means that for a long time, these leaders were strictly white males because that’s the most obvious conclusion.

As you can guess, when Games Workshop, the company that puts all this stuff out, started to create more characters in the Imperium that weren’t white or male, some voices in the community got very upset. This wasn’t the usual kind of “diversity is bad” rage that morons have been spouting for years. The fans of “40K’ who got mad about soldiers who weren’t white felt like they were defending something sacred; they felt like the legacy of the game was built on the same ideas of prejudice and xenophobia that the Imperium is riddled with. After all, the Imperium is white and the Imperium are the good guys, right?

Obviously, the characters and morality presented in all of the various “40K” stories are a lot more nuanced than that. Not every non-human is evil, and there are people in the Imperium who don’t agree with all of the blind worship that goes on, and thankfully, more of those kinds of stories are being shown in games like “Space Marine” and “Rogue Trader”.

Media literacy will elude some people, and they’ll be as happy as a pig in slop. Bigots and general idiots are a plague in a lot of fanbases,s and it’s usually people who saw something and didn’t get it. “Fight Club” is a great example of that, so is the previously mentioned “Starship Troopers”.

“Warhammer 40K” is a fascinating setting because even though all the lore is vast on a surface level, there’s also a lot of depth to each faction and the smaller groups within them. It is a hopeless setting where the might of the morally good is dwarfed by the massive engines of war that surround them. It’s just important to remember that not every main character is supposed to be cheered on.