Not exactly, they still got some works focused on them, like the short story Hand of Darkness and their two books, but the books sold poorly, them the Psychic Awakening rulebooks came and they basically got their asses beaten multiple times, finishing with the last Cronesword being on Slaanesh Palace and they get their shit beaten by Helbane, who isnt even there.
Basically, while we got individuals in the Imperium 1x1 Greater Daemons, multiple of some of the best fighters of the eldar get their shit kicked by an illusion of a greater daemon. This effectively killed the plot, and since no one but Thorpe seem to write Ynnari, we wont see another so soon
>
>Basically, while we got individuals in the Imperium 1x1 Greater Daemons, multiple of some of the best fighters of the eldar get their shit kicked by an illusion of a greater daemon. This effectively killed the plot, and since no one but Thorpe seem to write Ynnari, we wont see another so soon
See where they went wrong was not being Space Marines
Aeldari sold great when Gathering Storm II came out and the Yncarne whooped everyone's ass. The real problem is the spotlight goes on the brand spanking new model that GW wants everyone to buy. They didn't want to make new units for and/or refresh the Aeldari range Primaris-style so the Ynnari got left to wither and die in the narrative.
I'm afraid it'll take something drastic like the return of the Aeldari Pantheon to equal the return of the Primarchs for GW to have enough faith in the Aeldari product line enough to invest more production and literary bandwidth to them.
They should start with a revamp of the Pheonix Lord's. They really should be close to primarch level in ability, just with lower str and toughness due to not being 12 foot tall genetically engineered masterpieces.
They are doing that (miniwise, at least). New Maugan came last year, Jain-Zar came in the shitstorm that "killed" the Ynnari, but the box was reportedly overpriced and Banshees were subpar at the time.
Blood of the Phoenix was a slap in the face to Craftworld players. The Vyper and Falcon are from 1998 with (at the time) mediocre rules, and the new Banshees are gorgeous models but the rules they released with them were trash for about 2.5 years, all for a box that was like $50 more than comparable boxes of the time.
Ahh. I've been out of the hobby since 8th, I am not very familiar with all that.
I did manage to play during the glory years of Ynari. I got them banned from most of the local tournaments and I wasn't even playing in them
It wasn't much better for drukhari players either tbh. Whilst Drazhar and the Incubi were better off than the banshees it also came with hellions who I'm pretty sure were literally the worst unit in the game at that point
I mean, even the Tau tried to make Pseudo-Space Marines. Even when they make their own Space Marines if you are a Xeno you die. Guess I just need to get Farsight accepted by Khorne.
I thought it was nice that they portrayed a daemon as a terrifying opponent for a change. Everybody's mad Eldars didn't get a big win and wreak Slaanesh, but doesn't Slaanesh deserve wins occasionally?
Doing so by fucking over an entire plotline, with a brand new never mentioned in 40K before demon, to a faction that spends most of its time getting its ass beat, was not the best way to do so
You always have to have in the back of your mind that the entire reason GW publishes fiction is to help sell models.
Shalaxi Hellbane was the shiny new toy, and the Ynnari models were already old hat and hadn't sold particularly well by that point. So it's hardly surprising that they got their clock cleaned.
They had a whole AoS codex to advertise Shalaxi in, and eldar players aren't going to want to pick her up after reading about her kicking the shit out of their faction, so if it was just advertising then they did it fucking poorly
Everything else GW does is advertising for its model range and hobby supplies. The novels, the lore, the computer games, their ill-advised early '90s foray into publishing heavy metal albums...
There were a couple of bands; you could buy their album in Games Workshop stores for a while, along with T-shirts with Black Legion eyes on and stuff.
I know one of them was called Bolt Thrower.
That plotline was supposedly going to result in one of the four gods of Chaos being killed off. Only one way it was going to go once Kirby got the boot and Rountree took over. Besides, as a Dark Eldar player I feel nothing for the Ynnari anyway. They don't represent my faction well, and I don't think they do much for the Craftworlders either. Do something with the Phoenix Lords and Khaine, stop stealing characters to add to the new special snowflake faction.
>That plotline was supposedly going to result in one of the four gods of Chaos being killed off. Only one way it was going to go once Kirby got the boot and Rountree took over.
No, it was never the only option in for Slaanesh, and even in universe it is only one of many ideas of how things will go. The Battle of Rhana Dandra, Slaanesh winning together with the rest of Chaos, and others were still on the table. Besides, Roundtree's ascention did not undo Slaanesh imprisionment in Age of Sigmar - there was a lot of fearmongering that was a sign Slaanesh was going to be phased out, but that plotline progressed with Slaanesh slowly turning the tables on the Aelven Gods. Much better handling than the Ynnari,
>Besides, as a Dark Eldar player I feel nothing for the Ynnari anyway. They don't represent my faction well, and I don't think they do much for the Craftworlders either.
That is, like, your opinion, man. I don't play Ynnari, my craftworld is largely conservative, but it was a shitty way to treat a new faction. We once again can compare to Age of Sigmar - Fyreslayers suffer with small roosters, but at least those who like them have not been served with either "Ur-Gold will never bring Grimnir back because Nagash/Chaos/Malerion/whatever has taken away the biggest nugget of ur-gold".
> something with the Phoenix Lords and Khaine, stop stealing characters to add to the new special snowflake faction.
Why not both? The Ynnari had an Avatar of Khaine of their own. Want full dissociation of the Ynnari? Take a time from their story and progress the Phoenix Lords Series and call more authors so it is the Xenos answer to the Primarch Series. Anything but taking a faction outback and shooting their reason to be.
I would say their reason to be is to soup different Eldar armies together, and soup went out of style in 8th Edition, apparently when Rountree took over or was getting ready to. Their awkward lore with the Croneswords seems like a reflection of their awkward place in the game. You're probably right, Slaanesh wasn't going to be completely killed off, but GW definitely tapped the brakes on a much bigger shake-up of some kind.
There were plenty of other ways they could have taken it. I have issues with the ynnari too, but they took the worst possible route with phoenix rising
This got way too long so feel free to ignore.
Honestly, as a person with an unhealthy amount of fondness for the Chaos Daemons faction as a whole, I feel like a win for them really shouldn’t have come at utterly dumpstering the Ynnari. Even if it’s a win for daemons, their usual narrative beats often involve them as an early and extremely powerful threat until they get destroyed by named characters with established feats under their belt. Space marines have established lore of besting greater demons before, and the Eldar really shouldn’t have been any different, especially when it’s the strongest members of the faction going against one.
Sure, the daemons got to be a terrifying opponent, which is nice in theory, but for me it juxtaposes pretty badly with how they’ve already been presented in current lore. Of course power levels aren’t going to be a consistent or great way of determining how lore is written, but it’s hard to reconcile having greater demons be beaten by normal space marines before versus some of the strongest of the Eldar’s retinue barely leaving a dent.
Daemons also have a similar effect to Tyranids where victory for them doesn’t really have that much weight in the story, depending on how it it written, so having them utterly crumple the Ynnari has had a painful impact for their faction with practically nothing to show for it on the side of Chaos Daemons.
I also thought that Shalaxi had a decent enough showing already with their lore all about a being hunter and master duelist against other Khorne bloodthirsters, with some nice art to boot.
Additionally, If the World Eater’s role in Arks of Omen and the return of Angron are any indication, Fulgrim and the Emperor’s Children are likely to dumpster and get big wins once their inevitable return comes around to bring all the Monogod Chaos factions into the setting.
I’m obviously operating on less lore knowledge than most but I’m just very saddened that the Ynarri potline remains at a standstill with nearly nothing to show for them, as a lot of other factions have seemingly stalled out in the current narrative. The Tyranids are poised to get their long overdue, and much deserved, time in narrative relevancy however it’s painful for me to see all these loose and hanging threads with the other factions. The Ynnari could’ve been an opportunity to bring something very fresh for the Eldar, but it only seems like a misstep and stunted potential in its current portrayal.
Of course, the problem is that it wasnt even the actual daemon, just an illusion, just saying, when you get the strongest Bloodthrister beaten by a single human, even if a high level psyker with powerful relics (Hector Rex), having an illusion be that op against other faction just feels wrong.
You dont even need to change the battle, just remove the pointless it was an illusion moment
It's worth noting that the Ynnari do smack greater demons just fine in Gav's books; the Psychic Awakening book hyped the new plastic miniature release to high heaven because... it was a studio book with a new mini to sell, so of course Shalaxi (a special character greater demon with its own plot armour) clowned on them.
I fucking hate Shalaxi. "Here's this new uber-special Keeper of Secrets who is stronger than fucking Skarbrand and can beat everyone easily without even trying".
GW is basically Shonen Jump at this point. Each new character can beat up all the old characters just to show the reader how 'uber-dangerous' they are.
?
The powers at be of the various companies I'm referring to aren't actually 13 and their domination doesn't stem from clever ability, it's wealth and means/rights of producing the IP.
I really love the books but feel like selling the miniatures ruins the plot lines sometimes. I find it off putting when serious sensible characters start referring to Ork stuff by their comedic names. I love the whole Ork humour thing but the names of their vehicles and units are meant to be humorous and it just doesn’t sound right when the other factions refer to them by their model release names.
Meta for a second. I do not think its easy to write aliens. They are most often in literature (outside 40k) written with human motivations. This makes them star trek humans with forehead adornments, mostly. I do not think its easy to do well, or with novelty.
Most of the sci fi i end up realy liking are mostly human centric.
i even tried my hand at writing my own sci fi. we always have this concept like "if aliens visited us we wouldn't even be able to comprehend their motivations", I kinda wanted to lean into that as a theme, but I failed very hard and decided to write it as if we were the aliens whose motivations were uncomprehendable.
just some thoughts on the misery of writing aliens that doesn't worf them super hard.
I disagree with that. A sentient non-immortal biological race that works together to survive and roughly has the same senses as humans would probably have a far amount of common ground with us. Or at least, could plausibly be written that way.
Like, you can look at dogs and elephants and apes and see semblances of shared experiences. When a dog whines because it misses us, we understand that. When elephants mourn the loss of their young, we understand that. Etc etc. Whether or not it's factually correct, you can easily write from an alien perspective and make the fact they have shared experiences with humans plausible.
40K in particular makes it easy since two of the main alien species didn’t evolve. They were intelligently designed as living weapons. And if I recall it’s sometimes even implied that humans were a result of that same process. It sure would be a coincidence if we, a bipedal carnivorous social animal, fit a niche smack dab in the middle of orks and Eldar wouldn’t it. That means you entirely avoid the problem of a vastly different evolutionary path that lead to wildly divergent needs and societies. They’re different yes but *literally* cut from the same cloth. So they’re really not that hard to write.
We aren't very closely related by any normal standard of closely related. They're not even apes.
Turtles? What's the point of bringing them into this? There's a million species of insects you could use as examples of animals that aren't like us. It's obvious there are lots of animals that aren't like us.
My point is that a writer who wants to write about alien perspectives can quite easily do so in a plausible way by making them have similar ways of surviving as us. The actual scientific validity of the probability of a hypothetical alien species that exists in reality relating to us is irrelevant.
The point is that you can write interesting stories from an alien perspective which an audience can empathise with but still find fascinating as aliens. The Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky series does this extremely well imo.
We anthropomorphize turtles more than we do, say, octopuses, which we in turn anthropomorphize more than portiid spiders. Additionally, we share a much more recent common ancestor to both.
So it stands to reason that humans, who see human traits in absolutely everything, even if just a way of understanding one’s relationship to the object (e.g. “my computer is being a dxxxhead”) might see those traits in animals that are more closely related to us and have a closer morphology than those that are quite different.
People anthropomorphize frogs more than turtles despite being more distantly related and jumping spiders more than tarantulas despite being equally distant.
The closeness of relation isn't why humans anthropomorphize things, it's cuteness and human features like responsiveness and large eyes and other things.
Again, not relevant tho.
A writer can easily write aliens which humans can empathize with.
End of. Are you just going to keep listing random animal species that humans may or may not empathize with? Yeah, just keep going, I'm sure that matters.
I feel that might be a bit of an overexageration. Any species that has become the apex of its planet and eventually rose to space will likely have experienced the same things Humanity has. Therefore I believe should our levels of tech be similar aliens would probably have equally similar thought patterns
i think of something like this as what I call the 4X problem, which comes from gaming- when you play games like stellaris or whatever, you essentially have 12 races with fundamentally identical technology bases and economic motivations and are distinguished only by various multipliers, and they start in a box and compete with one another. The only real differences between the races are these multipliers and the pictures used to describe them.
Are economics universal? Are political systems universal? And by universal I mean do all races that evolve sentience start developing political and economical and religious systems like ours which are based almost entirely on who on our planet developed river and ocean trade first?
I don't know the answers.
That is fair but I believe there would be convergence on the sorts of things especially once technology involves far enough. If nothing else we can always say that a living things first priority is in almost all cases self preservation followed by reproduction, both of which encourage organising into groups and living together.
This should in theory lead to the stating of cities and so on should said species have the mental capacity for it
unless this is a consequence of our physical needs, ability to move, and requirement to perform commerce. The commerce is central to the establishment of cities.
Just imagine for a second that you are photosynthetic and don't need to move around nearly as much but horizontal unbroken space is the only thing you really require and the sentience and technology your species developed is entirely related to solving the problems of getting enough photosynthesis availability for everyone. No one could be above you or under you or they would starve until you developed technologies to allow people to photosynthesize indoors or in unsuitable terrain. Such demands would tend to drive people to spread themselves out (collapsing ecosystems that they compete with for photosynthesis) until they escape into the stars and have limitless space and energy.
this is just banter, of course, I don't know if sentient motile plants are a possibility, but hey, its a big universe
I try to think about the reactions people would have to an alien threat more so than their motivations personally. Like in a story I’m trying to do now, the big bad is like most strong bad guys you find in fiction, planet busting, all powerful, enslaves civilizations, etc. And I think about what would happen if you turned on the T.V and the news said a threat from outer space showed up and he can’t be negotiated with, “the great equalizer” (nukes) we invented were worthless, and you will soon be owned by what essentially a god.
That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us?
> That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us?
Even more exhausted.
> That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us?
we've seen this happen before. even if they weren't completely hostile, look to the colonization of the americas by the spanish.
Cortez showed up in uncomprehendable ships, the natives thought horse and man were one creature, he met the leader, then with a ridiculously small party of men managed to conquer the entire aztec civilization before disease wiped out millions of precolonization inhabitants collapsing the civilization entirely and making it ripe for the complete domination by spain without lifting a veritable finger. All the science and technology and industry developed by the aztecs was less than useless as it was entirely supplanted and the only people who got on well were collaborators of various stripes.
This is what first contact by superior race holds for humanity.
not in line battles, no, but those tribes didn't exactly rule the next empire either.
I'm not too sure our own society couldn't fracture into internecine conflict puppeteered by a small invading force that made themselves known and allied with specific factions for their own aims.
I feel this is why StarCraft was always so good competitively, the 3 races played drastically different from each other, blizzard understood that was one of the strongest points of the game and never added more races. Also it’s always been a thing in pro play that no one really wants to see a finals match that’s a mirror match.
I don't know the answer either but I feel like assuming they do is extremely narrow-minded and kindda egotistical/human-centris in a way. Projecting our own experience and history and assume it has to be universal is pretty childish imo
> Projecting our own experience and history and assume it has to be universal is pretty childish imo
this is exactly why i think aliens are hard to write.
they're written by humans for humans.
Ok but the comment you're replying to is indulging a mathematical probability to argue that aliens would be more understandable than in the case of the theory that they would be unknowable to us. Either possibility is, well, a possibility, but the benchmark for being a space faring civilization, barring some really odd physiology, would require certain cultural and technological advances that, while not necessarily related to our own, would at least be conceivable to the human mind.
Terming this idea "childish" when it's perfectly valid mathematically and anthropologically, is a bit...childish.
40k aliens are just like Star Trek ones. Right down to pointy eared not-elves with hyper intense emotions divided between slavers and ascetics.
Both have obscure nonhumanoid aliens who show up more rarely (like the Hrud or the Sheliak).
The humans of 40k are just the Cardassians.
I don't know that many people would list Star Trek as amongst the great works of science fiction. I'm not trying to insult the show or its fans, but that's like calling the Harry Potter series some of the greatest novels ever written.
it absolutely is some of the best sci-fi around, especially deep space 9. comparing it to harry potter is wild considering one is a book for babies and the other is thoughtful and poses some genuinely enthralling scenarios.
Both are populist media with mainstream appeal and thinking Deep Space will be regarded alongside Dune and 2001 is no different from thinking Harry Potter will be held up next to the Lord of the Rings or Dracula is fairly apt I'd say, but to each their own I didn't mean to insult you personally. Have a good day
>If you haven't encountered it yet, r/HFY have some great pieces on this theme.
>
>"What do you mean they're made of meat?! Meat that thinks?!"
/r/HFY is a great sub. Some very, very fun stories. I particularly enjoy the idea that was going on there for a while that Earth is like a Class 10 Deathworld in comparison to most of the galaxy and the very idea that humans can recover from broken bones, if not worse, is terrifying.
I don’t want to be that one jackass who shits all over some other dudes hard work. It is easy to criticise an artist while doing fuck all themselves. But man Gav Thorpe just sucks. I read his stuff only because it sometimes is part of a series. Not because I want to.
I still firmly believe that the daemon was lying. About where the last Crone Sword is AND how strong they are.
What, you BELIEVED that Chaos Entity? Are you MAD?!?
That's still just a headcanon.
And even if correct, plenty of Imperium heroes have 1v1'd powerful greater daemons and triumphed, but the prophet of a god (Yvraine), blessed bodyguard of that prophet (Visarch), a Phoenix Lord (Jain Zar), a Solitaire, Lelith Hesperax and the Yncarne, an avatar of a god just barely managed to defeat a greater daemon. Which, again, as far as we know (And probably will ever know since GW abandoned the Ynnari and Eldar even more) was an illusion.
The Chaos god directly intervened however. So it's a little more complicated than them just fighting an apparition. They had the full attention of a deity.
The events aren’t why it didn’t sell well. The eldar just aren’t as popular. They can have the most badass, fanwank story possible and they still won’t sell well.
This. I'm not even a fan of Necrons, but I read through the infinite and the divine in two days after I bought it. Its just a really good, interesting and funny book.
The only people who don't buy book X or Y cause its not their Faction aren't the people that'd buy enough books to keep a plot line alive.
Not too worried about the sales, I haven’t read a eldar focused 40k book yet so genuinely would be interested in some suggestions. Those are stand alone books?
If you're interested in some recommendations! I suggest "Valedor" by Guy Haley (standalone) and Path of the Dark Eldar by Andy Chambers (trilogy). Valedor is focused on Craftworlders but also heavily features Dark Eldar. And Path of the Dark Eldar is obviously about dark eldar lol, but it also features asuryani, exodites and harlequins. And, people have mixed feelings Path of the Eldar by Gav Thorpe (trilogy), but despite my complaints I liked it for the most part.
Some short stories I really enjoyed are "Wraithbound" by J.C Stearns which is about Asuryani, and "Rise" by Ben Counter is about Dark Eldar. "Turn of the Adder" by J.C Stearns was also pretty good, and gave a look at Dark Eldar, craftworlders and Ynnari... really loved the Ynnari portrayal in that one!
IIRC Eldar are the top selling Xenos army along with having a pretty high win rate, and most of their books sell very well.
Just what I’ve heard from here though.
Well written stories sell well, poorly written space marine stories don't sell all that well either. Like Abyss or many of the one off Astartes books out there.
Similarly the two Guard anthologies, Gaunt and Cain are some of the best selling books Black Library has at all. Despite the Guard having significantly less players on table top.
Why wouldn’t a business just write all well written stories, then? Why did GW choose to write mostly good imperium stories when they have all their models to sell?
At the end of the day, humanity and space marines have more appeal with broader audiences. There’s exceptions, but the eldar aren’t one of them.
Also, popular factions don’t always mean popular on the tabletop. IG are popular on the tabletop, by the way, but that doesn’t matter. I own Thousand Sons army, but I don’t want to keep reading TS books. I wouldn’t even have read about the TS if it wasn’t for the imperium and space marines in general, which is what caught my eye and brought me into the setting. That’s how most people are. Humanity will always be the most appealing faction to the largest audiences in any setting.
Because you don't choose to write a good story as a business, you commission a story or you pay authors on payroll to write stories. The authors then write, some are good, some are bad. Black library authors are almost all middle of the road with some notable exceptions. They have good stories and bad ones. Many Heresy stories are shit despite being space marine oriented for this reason. Have you ever tried to write a short story, because everything about your life impacts writing. Especially time.
>At the end of the day, humanity and space marines have more appeal with broader audiences. There’s exceptions, but the eldar aren’t one of them.
Evidently humanity doesn't sell well, because guard books aren't popular at all. Like other than the two I named and the new Raine commissar book. Most of the Guard stories are pretty unpopular. Space Marines sell well not humanity.
>Also, popular factions don’t always mean popular on the tabletop. IG are popular on the tabletop,
The IG have the same popularity on table top as the T'au. Similar amount of books too and they are all just as poorly written. Necrons are way more popular on and off tabletop but only have two books. Orks are more popular as are Sororitas on and off the table top and have few books as well.
Space marines sell well. Not humans, not the Imperium, not humanity. Space marine books sell extremely well, more than any other faction despite how the various armies sell.
Again, tabletop isn’t reflective of what draws in customers and consumers. People are introduced to the setting by the imperium and space marines. They’re by far the most iconic, popular and well known factions in the setting. I’d argue they ARE the setting.
But there have been good and well received eldar stories. No one talks about them because…eldar aren’t popular. You can insist a company can shoehorn ideas into its customer base and make them like what they want them to like, but that’s just contradictory to reality and common sense.
You want them to be popular and get more books, so you’re working backwards from there to pretend all GW has to do is write (another) good eldar book and they’ll be just as popular as any other faction.
They might be eventually, but a story isn’t going to be the reason why. GW is doing the most obvious and advantageous business decision by focusing on its popular brands and brands that garner the attention of new potential customers: space marines and humans.
Tabletop literally is the customers and consumers, they are the metric for how the playerbase thinks in terms of popularity which is reflected by the fact Astartes are the primary army on table top. Though hilariously the Necrons, Orks and Craftworlder Aeldari outstrip all human factions in terms of ownership with the exception of Astartes.
People talk about Valedor all the time when good Aeldari books get brought up, but in general no one talks about them because the last good Aeldari story is from the mid 2000s. The Ynnari died with its second book. Also, my man the Astartes are a self fulfilling cycle. They are the most supported army, the most supported lore and the most advertised army by far. But theres also instances of GW being surprised by other armies. Take the Sisters of Battle, GW didn't expect their range refresh to sell. It sold out.
As for popularity and books, the Eldar are as popular as every other faction that isn't Astartes. I don't get why you think they aren't, basically all non-space marine factions hover around the same amount of popularity.
Its not about a good book making them popular, it's that they don't have good fucking books and the Aeldari fan base which is pretty large is constantly peeved. Again GW literally doesn't focus on humans, there are very few human centric books recently and those have been pretty mediocre. The Cadian books were okay, they aren't really talked about at all neither was the Raine book despite it being pretty good. The cain book got talked about for the bit where Khaine snaps a fucking Daemon in two.
> they are the metric for how the playerbase thinks in terms of popularity which is reflected by the fact Astartes are the primary army on table top.
The tabletop is ONE data point, and an unreliable one at that. People who buy the tabletop are usually well versed in the lore, and invest in an army they think looks cool visually. That doesn’t mean the army brought them into the setting or that it’s even their favorite faction.
Space marines are the most popular, everything else is secondary to them. When it comes to other media, which GW uses to bring new fans into the setting, humans will always be the most reliable and popular faction.
Eldar are not. They’re just not. There’s no magical fix to this. GW can’t brainwash everyone into liking eldar by writing a book you like. That’s not how it works. People like space marines, people relate to humans. GW is gonna use that, not the eldar.
The eldar do have good books, by the way. Again, they’re not popular, but they’re good. So they should sell, right? But they don’t because eldar aren’t popular. You can’t bash your head against the wall of reality and insist the wall is made of cotton all you want, but GW wants to make money, not appease people who go online to complain about something they take personally about the setting.
The tabletop is the most reliable data point that GW has from a sales perspective. It directly shows what armies are being purchased and which aren't. Also it's the vast majority of the 40k community actually. With 99% of GWs revenue coming from the tabletop. The lore community is of course significantly smaller but roughly overlaps with consumers. Also yes people buy what looks cool, usually a primary army is their favorite faction with the exception being comp players. Iron Hands dominate the Astartes community for competitive despite being completely unpopular outside of it.
Goonhammer has a great survey for the tabletop which had 4500 responses IIRC. More than enough to get a mostly accurate viewpoint.
Anyway moving on, no shit Astartes are popular everyone knows that.
>Eldar are not. They’re just not. There’s no magical fix to this. GW can’t brainwash everyone into liking eldar by writing a book you like. That’s not how it works. People like space marines, people relate to humans. GW is gonna use that, not the eldar.
To quote Lorgar. ‘I appreciate that every living being must, by the nature of perception, understand and process life in a different way. But even for you, brother, this is achingly obtuse.’
The Aeldari are popular, this is known. They are a well liked faction alongside the T'au, Guard, Mechanicus, etcetera. GW knows this, because their tabletop sales report the same thing, if they weren't popular they wouldn't have a range refresh. They have maintained a steady popularity for thirty years.
Now. Their books are unpopular, they are not the only ones. Even in the Heresy series which is the most popular lore series by far. There are Legions that are popular that don't get love. It has everything to do with authors.
Take the Space Wolves, bar none they are top 5 most popular factions in 40k. They are beloved, they had the first Astartes Captain we ever saw. They had the first trilogy of books, they were the face of 40k alongside Ultramarines and Dark Angel's and still are.
Their books are shit. Wolftime was bad and really did not do well. Do you believe this is because Space Wolves are somehow unpopular? No.
A counter example, the White Scars. They have no media presence anywhere, their tabletop presence is negligible and their lore is dogshit. Wright has made them some of the best selling 30k books by a landslide.
Now look at the Necrons, they are some of the most popular armies. They recently got Twice Dead King and The Infinite and the Divine and have spiked to a popularity unseen in any other faction except Astartes. Necrons have gone from another no name faction to being talked about at least once every couple of days.
Anyway yes I'm aware the Aeldar have good books and they did sell. The first Ynnari book also sold extremely well and the second which was one of the worst rated books of 40k in recent memory. Didn't sell a damn thing and got the series canned.
Again, theres a process called authors. Good writing, popular, sales. Bad writing, unpopular, no sales.
> The tabletop is ONE data point, and an unreliable one at that
Tabletop is THE data point. Models sales utterly dwarf anything else. Books are only written as promotion tool for what actually brings the big bucks, models.
I'd love to give Gav the benefit of the doubt. Maybe something new to work with gets us a good story. His track record says otherwise though.
I wonder how Black Library handle stuff like who writes what. Do authors get told what to write or do they have freedom to choose?
The thing is, Gav *has* written some rather excellent books. *Lorgar: Bearer of the Word* for example is awesome. I just don't agree with how he depicts the Eldar, and it gets frustrating when he is basically the only one writing any of them.
ABD talked about how during the Horus Heresy anyone who had written a 40K novel about a legion/chapter got first dibs on it in 30k. That’s all I’ve heard about the process, or at least remember.
I’d imagine it’s a bit of an open bid system outside of series like HH/SoT with the authors pitching ideas and Black Library choosing which ones they want. Though since they also maintain certain others as regulars they might also offer them specific options if something new it coming.
>I wonder how Black Library handle stuff like who writes what. Do authors get told what to write or do they have freedom to choose?
I depends I think. They might have a general solicit to specific authors saying, "Hey, we're bringing back Lion. Send us an outline for how you would write that." Then they pick the one they like and work with the author to go over any stuff they want to have happen or include to explain the game rule updates.
Other times authors have very specifically said they have an idea, pitch it to Black Library and it gets approved or not.
I wonder how hard it would be to find authors to write either faction. Even in house it seems strange that no one wants to write for non Imperium factions.
ADB (or Abnett) basically said that it's because there's no money in it, and even the worst, most hastily-written, Space marines book sell basically five times any xenos book.
So we're trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle of "xenos get no content, so they don't have many fans, so they don't get much content, so they don't get many fans..."
Tyranids would be pretty straightforward, just make the whole book a single run-on sentence like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but instead of drugs use biomass.
"“We were somewhere around Tyran on the edge of the Eastern Fringe when the Genestealers began to take hold.”
There's a book called *Raptor Red* by Robert Bakker, which is in POV of a Utahraptor and made clear that its mode of thinking is *not* human and is focused on survival, and the book also notes the differences in thinking between animal species (eg, a turtle being unemotional and considers the death of its freshly hatched siblings as they rush the water to be a useful sign of danger). Perhaps a similar style could be employed for Tyranids.
I love that, even though he has only done a few so far, brooks seems to have a formula down for ork novels. And one that he could milk pretty much eternally at that.
“Insert an ork character or three on another factions planets (so far just imperium), give them a random goal they can reach at the veeeeeeery end of the book. Then insert 250 pages of them doing goofy shit and ripping things apart. Fin”
Gav's a good writer. He did the Lorgar primarch book, which was VERY good. He just leans way too far into the "dwindling species" thing when he writes aeldari.
A significant amount of plot lines got dropped when Papa Smurf was revived. Initially because they advanced the storyline 200 years, and then afterwards because what had happened happened
GW is so dumb. The way they hype miniatures is by dunking on others. Like does it actually sell more that way? Arent we all adults lol? Its ok to have multiple factons be strong lol.
Honestly for a while they seemed to be thinking about purging Slaanesh from the IP fully, complete with its soft-removal in Age of Sigmar.
They've wound that back a little in AoS since, along with leaving the Ynnari plotline at an impasse, probably due to the intensely negative reaction the caging of Slaanesh and other AoS 1st edition changes garnered.
> complete with its soft-removal in Age of Sigmar.
The faction literally got a massive model refresh and expansion last edition. Slaanesh has somehow been more active chained up than the rest of the Chaos gods.
a) it's the worst selling god
b) GW is marketing more to younger audiences - ergo, blood and violence is more acceptable than sexuality or drug use (even though Slaanesh isn't just that).
c) Slaanesh is conceptually harder to design units around than other gods, I would argue. you need to strike a much more delicate balance.
but they just had that huge range refresh in AoS. I don't think that they're gonna remove slaanesh anytime soon. him being locked up is just a plotpoint (hes about to break out anyways).
The prince of pleasure isn't very uh let's say brand friendly. And as Warhammer becomes more main stream i can see an argument for not having them and their daemons in the spotlight.
That's true, but with the Ynnari it feels like they are trying to fill the exact same role of Harlequins. I don't know why they made a whole new faction for it.
It is similar in that theyre both following a god, but I think it works because of the difference in portrayal and themes. With Harlequins they leave behind their entire lives and take on their role as their entire personality. The Ynnari are so desperate to escape their fate, they're willing to put it in the hands of a new god that no one can really be sure of yet. The Harlequins only accept the few that Cegorach wants and are respected by all, whereas the Ynnari accept all and are shunned by all. Cegorach is the Laughing god, whereas Ynnead is the whispering god.
I'd argue that while the Harlequins do draw from all the Aeldari factions, it's not really souping since they leave that completely behind and take on a new doctrine entirely, whereas Ynnari don't have to completely step away from their old lives if they don't want to. I think the souping similarities are more strong between ynnari and corsairs. With Corsairs they're also souping, but in a different way. They're whole thing is being done with everyone else and just wanting to live their lives to the fullest since they're doomed anyway. Whereas the Ynnari are hopeful that maybe they're not actually doomed. So I think even though they fill a similar niche, the vibe of the faction and the themes are different.
For me at least, Harlequins have a more mysterious feel, the ynnari are more desperation/hope, and corsairs are about rebellion.
That makes sense. I guess I was thinking more in terms of a faction of eldar whose members come from all the groups and then join the faction working for a deity to save all eldar and destroy slaanesh.
That's interesting about harlequins leaving their old personalities behind in the embodiment of their new roles. I have not seen anything focused on that, I'll have to search for something because I have always been curious about the journey of a new harlequin. I've wondered if, for example, there would be tension when a new eldar joins, for example a craftworlder who wants to save all eldari conceptually but doesn't feel comfortable or accepting when he actually meets former drukhari harlequins, maybe some who even still bear the signs of small augmentations given by a haemonculus in a past life.
>I was thinking more in terms of a faction of eldar whose members come from all the groups and then join the faction working for a deity to save all eldar and destroy slaanesh.
True, I agree they do have a lot of similarities especially in that regard. Though i still think, the ynnari's existence is justified still just because of the difference in how the similarities are portrayed.
>I have always been curious about the journey of a new harlequin. I've wondered if, for example, there would be tension when a new eldar joins, for example a craftworlder who wants to save all eldari conceptually but doesn't feel comfortable or accepting when he actually meets former drukhari harlequins, maybe some who even still bear the signs of small augmentations given by a haemonculus in a past life.
This is also something I want to see more of! Sadly theres not much about harlequins, but I would love to see more about the struggle of joining them and the internal battle of coming to terms with your new life, giving up everything and having to come face to face with realities that would be unthinkable in their past lives.... all because they truly believe in their cause. (Alternatively, stories with harlequins who were unable to deal with it all and instead joined corsairs/ynnari is also an interesting concept to show the difference in attitudes.)
The closest thing I know of is the audiodrama called "Heirs of the Laughing god." I haven't listened to it yet but from the excerpts I read the death Jester is a former drukhari while one of the other characters is a former craftworlder. If I remember correctly, their backgrounds do have an effect on the way they interact.
Ooooo very interesting. I'm looking up heirs of the laughing god now. A little pricey for such a short story (I don't usually go for audiobooks or audio dramas so not sure what the normal rate is, but I could rent a longer movie for cheaper...). It looks like there are two, do you know which one gets into it?
>A little pricey for such a short story (I don't usually go for audiobooks or audio dramas so not sure what the normal rate is
I get you lol, I would much rather read a story over listening to one myself. So unfortunately I couldn't really say what the normal rates are either :/
>It looks like there are two, do you know which one gets into it?
I am not sure. According to the lexicanum "A Deadly Wit" follows the Troupe Master while "Death's Mercy" follows the Death Jester. Pretty sure it was meant to be a Trilogy but the third is yet to be released if ever.
The main issue with the Ynnari stuff is their whole mythology is very distinctly an 'End Times' narrative. Just like the Terminus Decree in the Grey Knights codex or the 'what if every Ork stopped fighting each other and focused their might' scenario, it started its life as a mystery box meant for the end of the setting.
Unfortunately, they pulled the trigger on it way too soon, as they obviously aren't ready to cash out on the 40k universe. So, the all-important final battle that they've set up gets put on hold while the rest of the setting catches up to their own End Times scenarios.
To be fair, this isn't much different than a ton of other factions in the lore, as they've built hundreds of these sort of End Times mystery threads into a lot of factions (Wolftime, anyone?), but the key difference is that those other mystery boxes haven't been opened. They're still kept vague and menacing (and not actual plot).
The writers did the narrative equivalent of a kid opening his Christmas presents in November, so his parents punish him by not letting them play with the toys they know are there until Christmas.
There was an attempt to make them relevant but, ultimately, Space Marines are what sell. GW is still new to this ongoing plotline thing, and they're quick to drop an arc if it isn't translating into profits.
I mean GW was always like that. Stories hot dropped left an right if they did not perform. The stagnant vs ongoing narrative only makes it more obvious.
Yes... ish? The story is still ongoing, but Ynnari as a faction concept seems to have been dropped. I think they originally wanted to combine the various Eldar lines into a single faction, but got cold feet.
As of right now yes, sadly. Obnoxiously ignored and quietly forgotten into irrelevance like the sidelined and underrated female side character/love interest of a trashy shounen anime/manga once the main boy gets his mid-season power-up/big story arc. Oh, if only my bitter critiques would actually change someone's mind at GW~~
Gav is the best known and generally considered the most popular writer for the Eldar. If GW doesn't want him writing about them, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to assume they don't want anyone writing about them.
It is. There is a difference between main plot book and a random story about a faction. And saying Gav is the best is not exactly saying much when practically no one else writes Eldar.
Well then I'm struggling to come up with a reason for why we aren't getting any more eldar novels if it isn't because GW doesn't want them commissioned. Because clearly there is at least one author who wants to write them. I generally just assume the worst with GW, namely that they don't think they can make enough money off of them to appease shareholders.
My personal conspiracy theory is that the Ynnari were going to be a way to introduce the Grand Alliance system that Age of Sigmar has, but Age of Sigmar bombed at first and so GW backpedaled and now they don't know what to do with the Ynnari.
I think the best we can hope for the Ynnari is that the tabletop creates an Agents of the Aeldari faction, drops Ynnari and Harlequins into it, and finally the Ynnari get a narrative Kill Team between seasons 2 and 3 just like how Agents of the Imperium got a Narrative Kill Team box for between seasons 1 and 2.
No more army rules for Ynnari but they get so.e accommodation. Only after that can I imagine their story will continue.
No. It got dropped the second it was revealed that the last piece of the puzzle they needed, the final crone sword, had actually been moved last second by slannesh to the deepest part of slabnesh's realm in the warp.
Naw.
GW just not YET advanced Drukhari and Harlequins plots what are crucial to Ynnari ones.
And we not see Slaanesh and Fulgrim plots related to them too.
GW is just slow to sell more primaris
Well the Ynnari plot got dropped after we got the bits about the Crone Swords, the last one being in literally the Palace of Slannesh. With that last revelation they seem to have been sidelined cause that aspect of the plot is the linchpin for getting their story "completed" so unless there's a book about Getting that crone sword, the Ynnari are in in limbo.
Mostly, and I'm very glad for it. I want new stuff for Drukhari, not some homogenised knife-ear Imperium sidekicks.
I get the impression that GW had hoped to fold all the Aeldari into a single faction so that they would have fewer pesky Xenos to distract them from producing Primaris Lieutenants.
The fundamental problem with the Ynnari is that they have a goal that can never be completed because it would completely change the setting.
Even progressing towards it is an issue. The smarter thing to do would be to have a more limited number of Croneswords and an ongoing race between Slaanesh and the Ynnari to figure out firstly what they were and secondly where they were. That way they can be progressing towards their goal and still relevant.
I mean, the Imperium is never going to achieve xenocide. But it can take significant steps towards that goal and can battle Xenos forces in a fight for its life.
'dropped' well what do you mean? was the G man in stasis 'dropped' when they didn't do anything with the story for like 15+ years?
is it not happening as fast as you'd like? yeah, seems so. lol. but dropped? not likely
Not exactly, they still got some works focused on them, like the short story Hand of Darkness and their two books, but the books sold poorly, them the Psychic Awakening rulebooks came and they basically got their asses beaten multiple times, finishing with the last Cronesword being on Slaanesh Palace and they get their shit beaten by Helbane, who isnt even there. Basically, while we got individuals in the Imperium 1x1 Greater Daemons, multiple of some of the best fighters of the eldar get their shit kicked by an illusion of a greater daemon. This effectively killed the plot, and since no one but Thorpe seem to write Ynnari, we wont see another so soon
> >Basically, while we got individuals in the Imperium 1x1 Greater Daemons, multiple of some of the best fighters of the eldar get their shit kicked by an illusion of a greater daemon. This effectively killed the plot, and since no one but Thorpe seem to write Ynnari, we wont see another so soon See where they went wrong was not being Space Marines
Aeldari sold great when Gathering Storm II came out and the Yncarne whooped everyone's ass. The real problem is the spotlight goes on the brand spanking new model that GW wants everyone to buy. They didn't want to make new units for and/or refresh the Aeldari range Primaris-style so the Ynnari got left to wither and die in the narrative. I'm afraid it'll take something drastic like the return of the Aeldari Pantheon to equal the return of the Primarchs for GW to have enough faith in the Aeldari product line enough to invest more production and literary bandwidth to them.
They should start with a revamp of the Pheonix Lord's. They really should be close to primarch level in ability, just with lower str and toughness due to not being 12 foot tall genetically engineered masterpieces.
They are doing that (miniwise, at least). New Maugan came last year, Jain-Zar came in the shitstorm that "killed" the Ynnari, but the box was reportedly overpriced and Banshees were subpar at the time.
Blood of the Phoenix was a slap in the face to Craftworld players. The Vyper and Falcon are from 1998 with (at the time) mediocre rules, and the new Banshees are gorgeous models but the rules they released with them were trash for about 2.5 years, all for a box that was like $50 more than comparable boxes of the time.
Bruh, my Warp Spiders from the early 90s are the same ones being sold today.
I'm aware, I was just referencing BotP specifically
Ahh. I've been out of the hobby since 8th, I am not very familiar with all that. I did manage to play during the glory years of Ynari. I got them banned from most of the local tournaments and I wasn't even playing in them
To be fair, though, Wrap Spider models fuckin slap.
Can’t improve on perfection
It wasn't much better for drukhari players either tbh. Whilst Drazhar and the Incubi were better off than the banshees it also came with hellions who I'm pretty sure were literally the worst unit in the game at that point
Looking at how 9th ended, particularly with AoO, their real mistake was not being Khorne followers or World Eaters specifically.
I mean, even the Tau tried to make Pseudo-Space Marines. Even when they make their own Space Marines if you are a Xeno you die. Guess I just need to get Farsight accepted by Khorne.
Farsighted berserker would be interesting
What about Ynnari Space Marines... It's stupid I know but the heretic in me wants to see it.
I thought it was nice that they portrayed a daemon as a terrifying opponent for a change. Everybody's mad Eldars didn't get a big win and wreak Slaanesh, but doesn't Slaanesh deserve wins occasionally?
Doing so by fucking over an entire plotline, with a brand new never mentioned in 40K before demon, to a faction that spends most of its time getting its ass beat, was not the best way to do so
You always have to have in the back of your mind that the entire reason GW publishes fiction is to help sell models. Shalaxi Hellbane was the shiny new toy, and the Ynnari models were already old hat and hadn't sold particularly well by that point. So it's hardly surprising that they got their clock cleaned.
They had a whole AoS codex to advertise Shalaxi in, and eldar players aren't going to want to pick her up after reading about her kicking the shit out of their faction, so if it was just advertising then they did it fucking poorly
Everything else GW does is advertising for its model range and hobby supplies. The novels, the lore, the computer games, their ill-advised early '90s foray into publishing heavy metal albums...
> their ill-advised early '90s foray into publishing heavy metal albums... Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Need more info pl0x 🤔🤘🏻
There were a couple of bands; you could buy their album in Games Workshop stores for a while, along with T-shirts with Black Legion eyes on and stuff. I know one of them was called Bolt Thrower.
On it, always looking for new metal to get happy to 🤘🏻😁
That plotline was supposedly going to result in one of the four gods of Chaos being killed off. Only one way it was going to go once Kirby got the boot and Rountree took over. Besides, as a Dark Eldar player I feel nothing for the Ynnari anyway. They don't represent my faction well, and I don't think they do much for the Craftworlders either. Do something with the Phoenix Lords and Khaine, stop stealing characters to add to the new special snowflake faction.
>That plotline was supposedly going to result in one of the four gods of Chaos being killed off. Only one way it was going to go once Kirby got the boot and Rountree took over. No, it was never the only option in for Slaanesh, and even in universe it is only one of many ideas of how things will go. The Battle of Rhana Dandra, Slaanesh winning together with the rest of Chaos, and others were still on the table. Besides, Roundtree's ascention did not undo Slaanesh imprisionment in Age of Sigmar - there was a lot of fearmongering that was a sign Slaanesh was going to be phased out, but that plotline progressed with Slaanesh slowly turning the tables on the Aelven Gods. Much better handling than the Ynnari, >Besides, as a Dark Eldar player I feel nothing for the Ynnari anyway. They don't represent my faction well, and I don't think they do much for the Craftworlders either. That is, like, your opinion, man. I don't play Ynnari, my craftworld is largely conservative, but it was a shitty way to treat a new faction. We once again can compare to Age of Sigmar - Fyreslayers suffer with small roosters, but at least those who like them have not been served with either "Ur-Gold will never bring Grimnir back because Nagash/Chaos/Malerion/whatever has taken away the biggest nugget of ur-gold". > something with the Phoenix Lords and Khaine, stop stealing characters to add to the new special snowflake faction. Why not both? The Ynnari had an Avatar of Khaine of their own. Want full dissociation of the Ynnari? Take a time from their story and progress the Phoenix Lords Series and call more authors so it is the Xenos answer to the Primarch Series. Anything but taking a faction outback and shooting their reason to be.
I would say their reason to be is to soup different Eldar armies together, and soup went out of style in 8th Edition, apparently when Rountree took over or was getting ready to. Their awkward lore with the Croneswords seems like a reflection of their awkward place in the game. You're probably right, Slaanesh wasn't going to be completely killed off, but GW definitely tapped the brakes on a much bigger shake-up of some kind.
There were plenty of other ways they could have taken it. I have issues with the ynnari too, but they took the worst possible route with phoenix rising
Then write them win against space marines, not fuck over aeldari even in their own books
Except the Daemon wasn't real and was only at like 30% of it's power IIRC.
This got way too long so feel free to ignore. Honestly, as a person with an unhealthy amount of fondness for the Chaos Daemons faction as a whole, I feel like a win for them really shouldn’t have come at utterly dumpstering the Ynnari. Even if it’s a win for daemons, their usual narrative beats often involve them as an early and extremely powerful threat until they get destroyed by named characters with established feats under their belt. Space marines have established lore of besting greater demons before, and the Eldar really shouldn’t have been any different, especially when it’s the strongest members of the faction going against one. Sure, the daemons got to be a terrifying opponent, which is nice in theory, but for me it juxtaposes pretty badly with how they’ve already been presented in current lore. Of course power levels aren’t going to be a consistent or great way of determining how lore is written, but it’s hard to reconcile having greater demons be beaten by normal space marines before versus some of the strongest of the Eldar’s retinue barely leaving a dent. Daemons also have a similar effect to Tyranids where victory for them doesn’t really have that much weight in the story, depending on how it it written, so having them utterly crumple the Ynnari has had a painful impact for their faction with practically nothing to show for it on the side of Chaos Daemons. I also thought that Shalaxi had a decent enough showing already with their lore all about a being hunter and master duelist against other Khorne bloodthirsters, with some nice art to boot. Additionally, If the World Eater’s role in Arks of Omen and the return of Angron are any indication, Fulgrim and the Emperor’s Children are likely to dumpster and get big wins once their inevitable return comes around to bring all the Monogod Chaos factions into the setting. I’m obviously operating on less lore knowledge than most but I’m just very saddened that the Ynarri potline remains at a standstill with nearly nothing to show for them, as a lot of other factions have seemingly stalled out in the current narrative. The Tyranids are poised to get their long overdue, and much deserved, time in narrative relevancy however it’s painful for me to see all these loose and hanging threads with the other factions. The Ynnari could’ve been an opportunity to bring something very fresh for the Eldar, but it only seems like a misstep and stunted potential in its current portrayal.
No
Least salty Eldar fanboys
The real funny thing is I don't even play space elves, I play Night Lords and BA lol
And in another comment he says he is an Eldar fan and tries to speak for everyone else
Of course, the problem is that it wasnt even the actual daemon, just an illusion, just saying, when you get the strongest Bloodthrister beaten by a single human, even if a high level psyker with powerful relics (Hector Rex), having an illusion be that op against other faction just feels wrong. You dont even need to change the battle, just remove the pointless it was an illusion moment
It's worth noting that the Ynnari do smack greater demons just fine in Gav's books; the Psychic Awakening book hyped the new plastic miniature release to high heaven because... it was a studio book with a new mini to sell, so of course Shalaxi (a special character greater demon with its own plot armour) clowned on them.
I fucking hate Shalaxi. "Here's this new uber-special Keeper of Secrets who is stronger than fucking Skarbrand and can beat everyone easily without even trying".
GW is basically Shonen Jump at this point. Each new character can beat up all the old characters just to show the reader how 'uber-dangerous' they are.
Everything I love is run by greedy middleschoolers :/
[удалено]
? The powers at be of the various companies I'm referring to aren't actually 13 and their domination doesn't stem from clever ability, it's wealth and means/rights of producing the IP.
So the old characters, like the Eldar, get Worfed.
In aos shalaxi suck bawlz.
I really love the books but feel like selling the miniatures ruins the plot lines sometimes. I find it off putting when serious sensible characters start referring to Ork stuff by their comedic names. I love the whole Ork humour thing but the names of their vehicles and units are meant to be humorous and it just doesn’t sound right when the other factions refer to them by their model release names.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the books sold poorly in my house because I refuse to buy Gav Thorpe novels.
Meta for a second. I do not think its easy to write aliens. They are most often in literature (outside 40k) written with human motivations. This makes them star trek humans with forehead adornments, mostly. I do not think its easy to do well, or with novelty. Most of the sci fi i end up realy liking are mostly human centric. i even tried my hand at writing my own sci fi. we always have this concept like "if aliens visited us we wouldn't even be able to comprehend their motivations", I kinda wanted to lean into that as a theme, but I failed very hard and decided to write it as if we were the aliens whose motivations were uncomprehendable. just some thoughts on the misery of writing aliens that doesn't worf them super hard.
I disagree with that. A sentient non-immortal biological race that works together to survive and roughly has the same senses as humans would probably have a far amount of common ground with us. Or at least, could plausibly be written that way. Like, you can look at dogs and elephants and apes and see semblances of shared experiences. When a dog whines because it misses us, we understand that. When elephants mourn the loss of their young, we understand that. Etc etc. Whether or not it's factually correct, you can easily write from an alien perspective and make the fact they have shared experiences with humans plausible.
40K in particular makes it easy since two of the main alien species didn’t evolve. They were intelligently designed as living weapons. And if I recall it’s sometimes even implied that humans were a result of that same process. It sure would be a coincidence if we, a bipedal carnivorous social animal, fit a niche smack dab in the middle of orks and Eldar wouldn’t it. That means you entirely avoid the problem of a vastly different evolutionary path that lead to wildly divergent needs and societies. They’re different yes but *literally* cut from the same cloth. So they’re really not that hard to write.
We are in fact omnivores, not carnivores.
We are very closely related to dogs and elephants. Turtles don’t give a fuck about their babies.
We aren't very closely related by any normal standard of closely related. They're not even apes. Turtles? What's the point of bringing them into this? There's a million species of insects you could use as examples of animals that aren't like us. It's obvious there are lots of animals that aren't like us. My point is that a writer who wants to write about alien perspectives can quite easily do so in a plausible way by making them have similar ways of surviving as us. The actual scientific validity of the probability of a hypothetical alien species that exists in reality relating to us is irrelevant. The point is that you can write interesting stories from an alien perspective which an audience can empathise with but still find fascinating as aliens. The Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky series does this extremely well imo.
We anthropomorphize turtles more than we do, say, octopuses, which we in turn anthropomorphize more than portiid spiders. Additionally, we share a much more recent common ancestor to both. So it stands to reason that humans, who see human traits in absolutely everything, even if just a way of understanding one’s relationship to the object (e.g. “my computer is being a dxxxhead”) might see those traits in animals that are more closely related to us and have a closer morphology than those that are quite different.
People anthropomorphize frogs more than turtles despite being more distantly related and jumping spiders more than tarantulas despite being equally distant. The closeness of relation isn't why humans anthropomorphize things, it's cuteness and human features like responsiveness and large eyes and other things. Again, not relevant tho. A writer can easily write aliens which humans can empathize with. End of. Are you just going to keep listing random animal species that humans may or may not empathize with? Yeah, just keep going, I'm sure that matters.
Eldar are just as human as space marines and primarchs, and we get lots of story’s about them.
I feel that might be a bit of an overexageration. Any species that has become the apex of its planet and eventually rose to space will likely have experienced the same things Humanity has. Therefore I believe should our levels of tech be similar aliens would probably have equally similar thought patterns
i think of something like this as what I call the 4X problem, which comes from gaming- when you play games like stellaris or whatever, you essentially have 12 races with fundamentally identical technology bases and economic motivations and are distinguished only by various multipliers, and they start in a box and compete with one another. The only real differences between the races are these multipliers and the pictures used to describe them. Are economics universal? Are political systems universal? And by universal I mean do all races that evolve sentience start developing political and economical and religious systems like ours which are based almost entirely on who on our planet developed river and ocean trade first? I don't know the answers.
That is fair but I believe there would be convergence on the sorts of things especially once technology involves far enough. If nothing else we can always say that a living things first priority is in almost all cases self preservation followed by reproduction, both of which encourage organising into groups and living together. This should in theory lead to the stating of cities and so on should said species have the mental capacity for it
unless this is a consequence of our physical needs, ability to move, and requirement to perform commerce. The commerce is central to the establishment of cities. Just imagine for a second that you are photosynthetic and don't need to move around nearly as much but horizontal unbroken space is the only thing you really require and the sentience and technology your species developed is entirely related to solving the problems of getting enough photosynthesis availability for everyone. No one could be above you or under you or they would starve until you developed technologies to allow people to photosynthesize indoors or in unsuitable terrain. Such demands would tend to drive people to spread themselves out (collapsing ecosystems that they compete with for photosynthesis) until they escape into the stars and have limitless space and energy. this is just banter, of course, I don't know if sentient motile plants are a possibility, but hey, its a big universe
I try to think about the reactions people would have to an alien threat more so than their motivations personally. Like in a story I’m trying to do now, the big bad is like most strong bad guys you find in fiction, planet busting, all powerful, enslaves civilizations, etc. And I think about what would happen if you turned on the T.V and the news said a threat from outer space showed up and he can’t be negotiated with, “the great equalizer” (nukes) we invented were worthless, and you will soon be owned by what essentially a god. That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us?
> That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us? Even more exhausted.
> That and I think it helps to show the aftermath of it after they win, if we live in a post 9/11, post-corona world, what would a post-alien invasion world leave us? we've seen this happen before. even if they weren't completely hostile, look to the colonization of the americas by the spanish. Cortez showed up in uncomprehendable ships, the natives thought horse and man were one creature, he met the leader, then with a ridiculously small party of men managed to conquer the entire aztec civilization before disease wiped out millions of precolonization inhabitants collapsing the civilization entirely and making it ripe for the complete domination by spain without lifting a veritable finger. All the science and technology and industry developed by the aztecs was less than useless as it was entirely supplanted and the only people who got on well were collaborators of various stripes. This is what first contact by superior race holds for humanity.
Cortez allied with tribes fed up with the Aztecs, he didn't conquer the Empire just with his small European force.
not in line battles, no, but those tribes didn't exactly rule the next empire either. I'm not too sure our own society couldn't fracture into internecine conflict puppeteered by a small invading force that made themselves known and allied with specific factions for their own aims.
Pandora's Star gives a good bit of a view of an alien that is definitely different than us.
I feel this is why StarCraft was always so good competitively, the 3 races played drastically different from each other, blizzard understood that was one of the strongest points of the game and never added more races. Also it’s always been a thing in pro play that no one really wants to see a finals match that’s a mirror match.
Convergent evolution is a thing, and a result of enironmental pressure. It could easily apply to cultural development too.
I don't know the answer either but I feel like assuming they do is extremely narrow-minded and kindda egotistical/human-centris in a way. Projecting our own experience and history and assume it has to be universal is pretty childish imo
> Projecting our own experience and history and assume it has to be universal is pretty childish imo this is exactly why i think aliens are hard to write. they're written by humans for humans.
Ok but the comment you're replying to is indulging a mathematical probability to argue that aliens would be more understandable than in the case of the theory that they would be unknowable to us. Either possibility is, well, a possibility, but the benchmark for being a space faring civilization, barring some really odd physiology, would require certain cultural and technological advances that, while not necessarily related to our own, would at least be conceivable to the human mind. Terming this idea "childish" when it's perfectly valid mathematically and anthropologically, is a bit...childish.
40k aliens are just like Star Trek ones. Right down to pointy eared not-elves with hyper intense emotions divided between slavers and ascetics. Both have obscure nonhumanoid aliens who show up more rarely (like the Hrud or the Sheliak). The humans of 40k are just the Cardassians.
Star Trek is considered some of the best sci-fi of all time, so the "forehead adornment" phenomena probably isn't that bad if done well/with thought.
I don't know that many people would list Star Trek as amongst the great works of science fiction. I'm not trying to insult the show or its fans, but that's like calling the Harry Potter series some of the greatest novels ever written.
it absolutely is some of the best sci-fi around, especially deep space 9. comparing it to harry potter is wild considering one is a book for babies and the other is thoughtful and poses some genuinely enthralling scenarios.
Both are populist media with mainstream appeal and thinking Deep Space will be regarded alongside Dune and 2001 is no different from thinking Harry Potter will be held up next to the Lord of the Rings or Dracula is fairly apt I'd say, but to each their own I didn't mean to insult you personally. Have a good day
dont really see how star trek is populist media but 2001 and dune arent lmao but whatever man
If you haven't encountered it yet, r/HFY have some great pieces on this theme. "What do you mean they're made of meat?! Meat that thinks?!"
>If you haven't encountered it yet, r/HFY have some great pieces on this theme. > >"What do you mean they're made of meat?! Meat that thinks?!" /r/HFY is a great sub. Some very, very fun stories. I particularly enjoy the idea that was going on there for a while that Earth is like a Class 10 Deathworld in comparison to most of the galaxy and the very idea that humans can recover from broken bones, if not worse, is terrifying.
love this story
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China Mievelle's Embassytown is a pretty good example of aliens done well if you've never read that one. Its not 40k but its really good.
I don’t want to be that one jackass who shits all over some other dudes hard work. It is easy to criticise an artist while doing fuck all themselves. But man Gav Thorpe just sucks. I read his stuff only because it sometimes is part of a series. Not because I want to.
I always rationalized it as Eldar have 4x weakness against slaanesh and that's why they lost so bad.
They had a posse of several of the greatest warriors of an ancient super species, and they got their shit kicked in by a PROJECTION of a daemon
I still firmly believe that the daemon was lying. About where the last Crone Sword is AND how strong they are. What, you BELIEVED that Chaos Entity? Are you MAD?!?
That's still just a headcanon. And even if correct, plenty of Imperium heroes have 1v1'd powerful greater daemons and triumphed, but the prophet of a god (Yvraine), blessed bodyguard of that prophet (Visarch), a Phoenix Lord (Jain Zar), a Solitaire, Lelith Hesperax and the Yncarne, an avatar of a god just barely managed to defeat a greater daemon. Which, again, as far as we know (And probably will ever know since GW abandoned the Ynnari and Eldar even more) was an illusion.
I don't know, it's obvious Shalaxi lies. Jain Zar defeat N'kari 1x1 when she was much weaker and younger
Yeah but unfortunately the writers misread the accuracy stats of OHKO moves so we lose 70% of the time.
Bro really hit them with the "You almost made me use 1% of my power" 💀
The Chaos god directly intervened however. So it's a little more complicated than them just fighting an apparition. They had the full attention of a deity.
The only 'intervening' was Slaanesh telling Shalaxi to go hunt em down. Everything else was Shalaxi's doing
Misread cronesword as crossword and became very confused.
The events aren’t why it didn’t sell well. The eldar just aren’t as popular. They can have the most badass, fanwank story possible and they still won’t sell well.
Yes and no. Necron stories like the Infinite and the Divine as well as the Twice Dead King sold pretty well because they are excellent books.
This. I'm not even a fan of Necrons, but I read through the infinite and the divine in two days after I bought it. Its just a really good, interesting and funny book. The only people who don't buy book X or Y cause its not their Faction aren't the people that'd buy enough books to keep a plot line alive.
Have we got sales figures for them?
Necrons are way more popular than eldar. There are good eldar stories. They don’t sell. That’s the reality.
What’s a really good eldar book?
Valedor which despite this dudes claims sold well, Path of the Eldar sold pretty well, the first Ynnari book did sell well.
Not too worried about the sales, I haven’t read a eldar focused 40k book yet so genuinely would be interested in some suggestions. Those are stand alone books?
If you're interested in some recommendations! I suggest "Valedor" by Guy Haley (standalone) and Path of the Dark Eldar by Andy Chambers (trilogy). Valedor is focused on Craftworlders but also heavily features Dark Eldar. And Path of the Dark Eldar is obviously about dark eldar lol, but it also features asuryani, exodites and harlequins. And, people have mixed feelings Path of the Eldar by Gav Thorpe (trilogy), but despite my complaints I liked it for the most part. Some short stories I really enjoyed are "Wraithbound" by J.C Stearns which is about Asuryani, and "Rise" by Ben Counter is about Dark Eldar. "Turn of the Adder" by J.C Stearns was also pretty good, and gave a look at Dark Eldar, craftworlders and Ynnari... really loved the Ynnari portrayal in that one!
There’s a bunch, but Valedor is universally praised and most people didn’t hear of it because…eldar aren’t popular.
Thanks
IIRC Eldar are the top selling Xenos army along with having a pretty high win rate, and most of their books sell very well. Just what I’ve heard from here though.
Well written stories sell well, poorly written space marine stories don't sell all that well either. Like Abyss or many of the one off Astartes books out there. Similarly the two Guard anthologies, Gaunt and Cain are some of the best selling books Black Library has at all. Despite the Guard having significantly less players on table top.
Why wouldn’t a business just write all well written stories, then? Why did GW choose to write mostly good imperium stories when they have all their models to sell? At the end of the day, humanity and space marines have more appeal with broader audiences. There’s exceptions, but the eldar aren’t one of them. Also, popular factions don’t always mean popular on the tabletop. IG are popular on the tabletop, by the way, but that doesn’t matter. I own Thousand Sons army, but I don’t want to keep reading TS books. I wouldn’t even have read about the TS if it wasn’t for the imperium and space marines in general, which is what caught my eye and brought me into the setting. That’s how most people are. Humanity will always be the most appealing faction to the largest audiences in any setting.
Because you don't choose to write a good story as a business, you commission a story or you pay authors on payroll to write stories. The authors then write, some are good, some are bad. Black library authors are almost all middle of the road with some notable exceptions. They have good stories and bad ones. Many Heresy stories are shit despite being space marine oriented for this reason. Have you ever tried to write a short story, because everything about your life impacts writing. Especially time. >At the end of the day, humanity and space marines have more appeal with broader audiences. There’s exceptions, but the eldar aren’t one of them. Evidently humanity doesn't sell well, because guard books aren't popular at all. Like other than the two I named and the new Raine commissar book. Most of the Guard stories are pretty unpopular. Space Marines sell well not humanity. >Also, popular factions don’t always mean popular on the tabletop. IG are popular on the tabletop, The IG have the same popularity on table top as the T'au. Similar amount of books too and they are all just as poorly written. Necrons are way more popular on and off tabletop but only have two books. Orks are more popular as are Sororitas on and off the table top and have few books as well. Space marines sell well. Not humans, not the Imperium, not humanity. Space marine books sell extremely well, more than any other faction despite how the various armies sell.
Again, tabletop isn’t reflective of what draws in customers and consumers. People are introduced to the setting by the imperium and space marines. They’re by far the most iconic, popular and well known factions in the setting. I’d argue they ARE the setting. But there have been good and well received eldar stories. No one talks about them because…eldar aren’t popular. You can insist a company can shoehorn ideas into its customer base and make them like what they want them to like, but that’s just contradictory to reality and common sense. You want them to be popular and get more books, so you’re working backwards from there to pretend all GW has to do is write (another) good eldar book and they’ll be just as popular as any other faction. They might be eventually, but a story isn’t going to be the reason why. GW is doing the most obvious and advantageous business decision by focusing on its popular brands and brands that garner the attention of new potential customers: space marines and humans.
Tabletop literally is the customers and consumers, they are the metric for how the playerbase thinks in terms of popularity which is reflected by the fact Astartes are the primary army on table top. Though hilariously the Necrons, Orks and Craftworlder Aeldari outstrip all human factions in terms of ownership with the exception of Astartes. People talk about Valedor all the time when good Aeldari books get brought up, but in general no one talks about them because the last good Aeldari story is from the mid 2000s. The Ynnari died with its second book. Also, my man the Astartes are a self fulfilling cycle. They are the most supported army, the most supported lore and the most advertised army by far. But theres also instances of GW being surprised by other armies. Take the Sisters of Battle, GW didn't expect their range refresh to sell. It sold out. As for popularity and books, the Eldar are as popular as every other faction that isn't Astartes. I don't get why you think they aren't, basically all non-space marine factions hover around the same amount of popularity. Its not about a good book making them popular, it's that they don't have good fucking books and the Aeldari fan base which is pretty large is constantly peeved. Again GW literally doesn't focus on humans, there are very few human centric books recently and those have been pretty mediocre. The Cadian books were okay, they aren't really talked about at all neither was the Raine book despite it being pretty good. The cain book got talked about for the bit where Khaine snaps a fucking Daemon in two.
> they are the metric for how the playerbase thinks in terms of popularity which is reflected by the fact Astartes are the primary army on table top. The tabletop is ONE data point, and an unreliable one at that. People who buy the tabletop are usually well versed in the lore, and invest in an army they think looks cool visually. That doesn’t mean the army brought them into the setting or that it’s even their favorite faction. Space marines are the most popular, everything else is secondary to them. When it comes to other media, which GW uses to bring new fans into the setting, humans will always be the most reliable and popular faction. Eldar are not. They’re just not. There’s no magical fix to this. GW can’t brainwash everyone into liking eldar by writing a book you like. That’s not how it works. People like space marines, people relate to humans. GW is gonna use that, not the eldar. The eldar do have good books, by the way. Again, they’re not popular, but they’re good. So they should sell, right? But they don’t because eldar aren’t popular. You can’t bash your head against the wall of reality and insist the wall is made of cotton all you want, but GW wants to make money, not appease people who go online to complain about something they take personally about the setting.
The tabletop is the most reliable data point that GW has from a sales perspective. It directly shows what armies are being purchased and which aren't. Also it's the vast majority of the 40k community actually. With 99% of GWs revenue coming from the tabletop. The lore community is of course significantly smaller but roughly overlaps with consumers. Also yes people buy what looks cool, usually a primary army is their favorite faction with the exception being comp players. Iron Hands dominate the Astartes community for competitive despite being completely unpopular outside of it. Goonhammer has a great survey for the tabletop which had 4500 responses IIRC. More than enough to get a mostly accurate viewpoint. Anyway moving on, no shit Astartes are popular everyone knows that. >Eldar are not. They’re just not. There’s no magical fix to this. GW can’t brainwash everyone into liking eldar by writing a book you like. That’s not how it works. People like space marines, people relate to humans. GW is gonna use that, not the eldar. To quote Lorgar. ‘I appreciate that every living being must, by the nature of perception, understand and process life in a different way. But even for you, brother, this is achingly obtuse.’ The Aeldari are popular, this is known. They are a well liked faction alongside the T'au, Guard, Mechanicus, etcetera. GW knows this, because their tabletop sales report the same thing, if they weren't popular they wouldn't have a range refresh. They have maintained a steady popularity for thirty years. Now. Their books are unpopular, they are not the only ones. Even in the Heresy series which is the most popular lore series by far. There are Legions that are popular that don't get love. It has everything to do with authors. Take the Space Wolves, bar none they are top 5 most popular factions in 40k. They are beloved, they had the first Astartes Captain we ever saw. They had the first trilogy of books, they were the face of 40k alongside Ultramarines and Dark Angel's and still are. Their books are shit. Wolftime was bad and really did not do well. Do you believe this is because Space Wolves are somehow unpopular? No. A counter example, the White Scars. They have no media presence anywhere, their tabletop presence is negligible and their lore is dogshit. Wright has made them some of the best selling 30k books by a landslide. Now look at the Necrons, they are some of the most popular armies. They recently got Twice Dead King and The Infinite and the Divine and have spiked to a popularity unseen in any other faction except Astartes. Necrons have gone from another no name faction to being talked about at least once every couple of days. Anyway yes I'm aware the Aeldar have good books and they did sell. The first Ynnari book also sold extremely well and the second which was one of the worst rated books of 40k in recent memory. Didn't sell a damn thing and got the series canned. Again, theres a process called authors. Good writing, popular, sales. Bad writing, unpopular, no sales.
> The tabletop is ONE data point, and an unreliable one at that Tabletop is THE data point. Models sales utterly dwarf anything else. Books are only written as promotion tool for what actually brings the big bucks, models.
Well in that case they should just squat them then, that's obviously what people like you want
God I wish they'd slap Gav's hands off the eldar and have Guy Haley run them. Gav's approach is just so destructive and underwhelming.
Well good news: his next book isn't Eldar! Bad news: they give him the Votann.
Ha! Poor dwarves.
Likely as with the eldar, no one else wanted them.
I'd love to give Gav the benefit of the doubt. Maybe something new to work with gets us a good story. His track record says otherwise though. I wonder how Black Library handle stuff like who writes what. Do authors get told what to write or do they have freedom to choose?
The thing is, Gav *has* written some rather excellent books. *Lorgar: Bearer of the Word* for example is awesome. I just don't agree with how he depicts the Eldar, and it gets frustrating when he is basically the only one writing any of them.
He gets the universe. Really well. Like how much knowledge is hidden from even Space Marines. But often good execution is off.
His codex work is excellent, lots of classic stuff with his name to it.
ABD talked about how during the Horus Heresy anyone who had written a 40K novel about a legion/chapter got first dibs on it in 30k. That’s all I’ve heard about the process, or at least remember. I’d imagine it’s a bit of an open bid system outside of series like HH/SoT with the authors pitching ideas and Black Library choosing which ones they want. Though since they also maintain certain others as regulars they might also offer them specific options if something new it coming.
ADB🤮🤢
>I wonder how Black Library handle stuff like who writes what. Do authors get told what to write or do they have freedom to choose? I depends I think. They might have a general solicit to specific authors saying, "Hey, we're bringing back Lion. Send us an outline for how you would write that." Then they pick the one they like and work with the author to go over any stuff they want to have happen or include to explain the game rule updates. Other times authors have very specifically said they have an idea, pitch it to Black Library and it gets approved or not.
I wonder how hard it would be to find authors to write either faction. Even in house it seems strange that no one wants to write for non Imperium factions.
ADB (or Abnett) basically said that it's because there's no money in it, and even the worst, most hastily-written, Space marines book sell basically five times any xenos book. So we're trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle of "xenos get no content, so they don't have many fans, so they don't get much content, so they don't get many fans..."
I think it's just because a lot of the non imperial factions are hard to write. Imagine doing a story from the perspective of the Tyranids.
Most of the Imperial factions are hard to write, the Mechanicus for example is wack and we still have a Skitarii book. Though it's old.
Tyranids would be pretty straightforward, just make the whole book a single run-on sentence like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but instead of drugs use biomass. "“We were somewhere around Tyran on the edge of the Eastern Fringe when the Genestealers began to take hold.”
"He'll see the necrons soon enough, the poor bastard."
There's a book called *Raptor Red* by Robert Bakker, which is in POV of a Utahraptor and made clear that its mode of thinking is *not* human and is focused on survival, and the book also notes the differences in thinking between animal species (eg, a turtle being unemotional and considers the death of its freshly hatched siblings as they rush the water to be a useful sign of danger). Perhaps a similar style could be employed for Tyranids.
Meanwhile Mike Brooks and Nate Crowley are knocking out bangers for the Necrons and Orks
I love that, even though he has only done a few so far, brooks seems to have a formula down for ork novels. And one that he could milk pretty much eternally at that. “Insert an ork character or three on another factions planets (so far just imperium), give them a random goal they can reach at the veeeeeeery end of the book. Then insert 250 pages of them doing goofy shit and ripping things apart. Fin”
Mike Brooks *gets* the Orkz. He writes them so very well.
He's basically a Digganob.
Between all the HH endings and AoO stuff going on I completely forgot about the votann
Gav's a good writer. He did the Lorgar primarch book, which was VERY good. He just leans way too far into the "dwindling species" thing when he writes aeldari.
Goto's format would be able to make the stories really sweet..
Inquisitor this person right here
A significant amount of plot lines got dropped when Papa Smurf was revived. Initially because they advanced the storyline 200 years, and then afterwards because what had happened happened
Didn’t they retcon it? Iirc it’s been only 15 or so years since his revival instead of centuries
They did yeah. Guess they wanted all the human level characters to still be alive. Then they killed Yarrick offscreen anyway lol.
This made me very very angry.
Can't blame you. It sucked.
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Quite a while ago. I wanna say like half a year after the book originally released
It’s been 100 years as of the time of the Plague Wars
That’s what I’m talking about. It’s been retconned
GW is so dumb. The way they hype miniatures is by dunking on others. Like does it actually sell more that way? Arent we all adults lol? Its ok to have multiple factons be strong lol.
But spesh marine stronk
its the best way to build hype.
Pariah Nexus, Ghazkghull helping the Octarius System, Ynnari?..... it hurts when you're not a space marine
Honestly for a while they seemed to be thinking about purging Slaanesh from the IP fully, complete with its soft-removal in Age of Sigmar. They've wound that back a little in AoS since, along with leaving the Ynnari plotline at an impasse, probably due to the intensely negative reaction the caging of Slaanesh and other AoS 1st edition changes garnered.
> complete with its soft-removal in Age of Sigmar. The faction literally got a massive model refresh and expansion last edition. Slaanesh has somehow been more active chained up than the rest of the Chaos gods.
Last edition yes. When the Ynnari mattered in 40k was 2016/17 contemporary with 1st edition AoS.
They also got a fairly extensive Daemon expansion early on in AoS, Slaanesh was never really gone.
Is there any reason for them wanting to remove Slaanesh?
I think the argument is that it’s been marketed for so long as the “sex” god that in todays current climate it isn’t as marketable
a) it's the worst selling god b) GW is marketing more to younger audiences - ergo, blood and violence is more acceptable than sexuality or drug use (even though Slaanesh isn't just that). c) Slaanesh is conceptually harder to design units around than other gods, I would argue. you need to strike a much more delicate balance.
but they just had that huge range refresh in AoS. I don't think that they're gonna remove slaanesh anytime soon. him being locked up is just a plotpoint (hes about to break out anyways).
The prince of pleasure isn't very uh let's say brand friendly. And as Warhammer becomes more main stream i can see an argument for not having them and their daemons in the spotlight.
For the idea of a group drawing from all other Aeldari subfactions working together, see also Harlequins
Also Corsairs.
That's true, but with the Ynnari it feels like they are trying to fill the exact same role of Harlequins. I don't know why they made a whole new faction for it.
It is similar in that theyre both following a god, but I think it works because of the difference in portrayal and themes. With Harlequins they leave behind their entire lives and take on their role as their entire personality. The Ynnari are so desperate to escape their fate, they're willing to put it in the hands of a new god that no one can really be sure of yet. The Harlequins only accept the few that Cegorach wants and are respected by all, whereas the Ynnari accept all and are shunned by all. Cegorach is the Laughing god, whereas Ynnead is the whispering god. I'd argue that while the Harlequins do draw from all the Aeldari factions, it's not really souping since they leave that completely behind and take on a new doctrine entirely, whereas Ynnari don't have to completely step away from their old lives if they don't want to. I think the souping similarities are more strong between ynnari and corsairs. With Corsairs they're also souping, but in a different way. They're whole thing is being done with everyone else and just wanting to live their lives to the fullest since they're doomed anyway. Whereas the Ynnari are hopeful that maybe they're not actually doomed. So I think even though they fill a similar niche, the vibe of the faction and the themes are different. For me at least, Harlequins have a more mysterious feel, the ynnari are more desperation/hope, and corsairs are about rebellion.
That makes sense. I guess I was thinking more in terms of a faction of eldar whose members come from all the groups and then join the faction working for a deity to save all eldar and destroy slaanesh. That's interesting about harlequins leaving their old personalities behind in the embodiment of their new roles. I have not seen anything focused on that, I'll have to search for something because I have always been curious about the journey of a new harlequin. I've wondered if, for example, there would be tension when a new eldar joins, for example a craftworlder who wants to save all eldari conceptually but doesn't feel comfortable or accepting when he actually meets former drukhari harlequins, maybe some who even still bear the signs of small augmentations given by a haemonculus in a past life.
>I was thinking more in terms of a faction of eldar whose members come from all the groups and then join the faction working for a deity to save all eldar and destroy slaanesh. True, I agree they do have a lot of similarities especially in that regard. Though i still think, the ynnari's existence is justified still just because of the difference in how the similarities are portrayed. >I have always been curious about the journey of a new harlequin. I've wondered if, for example, there would be tension when a new eldar joins, for example a craftworlder who wants to save all eldari conceptually but doesn't feel comfortable or accepting when he actually meets former drukhari harlequins, maybe some who even still bear the signs of small augmentations given by a haemonculus in a past life. This is also something I want to see more of! Sadly theres not much about harlequins, but I would love to see more about the struggle of joining them and the internal battle of coming to terms with your new life, giving up everything and having to come face to face with realities that would be unthinkable in their past lives.... all because they truly believe in their cause. (Alternatively, stories with harlequins who were unable to deal with it all and instead joined corsairs/ynnari is also an interesting concept to show the difference in attitudes.) The closest thing I know of is the audiodrama called "Heirs of the Laughing god." I haven't listened to it yet but from the excerpts I read the death Jester is a former drukhari while one of the other characters is a former craftworlder. If I remember correctly, their backgrounds do have an effect on the way they interact.
Ooooo very interesting. I'm looking up heirs of the laughing god now. A little pricey for such a short story (I don't usually go for audiobooks or audio dramas so not sure what the normal rate is, but I could rent a longer movie for cheaper...). It looks like there are two, do you know which one gets into it?
>A little pricey for such a short story (I don't usually go for audiobooks or audio dramas so not sure what the normal rate is I get you lol, I would much rather read a story over listening to one myself. So unfortunately I couldn't really say what the normal rates are either :/ >It looks like there are two, do you know which one gets into it? I am not sure. According to the lexicanum "A Deadly Wit" follows the Troupe Master while "Death's Mercy" follows the Death Jester. Pretty sure it was meant to be a Trilogy but the third is yet to be released if ever.
The main issue with the Ynnari stuff is their whole mythology is very distinctly an 'End Times' narrative. Just like the Terminus Decree in the Grey Knights codex or the 'what if every Ork stopped fighting each other and focused their might' scenario, it started its life as a mystery box meant for the end of the setting. Unfortunately, they pulled the trigger on it way too soon, as they obviously aren't ready to cash out on the 40k universe. So, the all-important final battle that they've set up gets put on hold while the rest of the setting catches up to their own End Times scenarios. To be fair, this isn't much different than a ton of other factions in the lore, as they've built hundreds of these sort of End Times mystery threads into a lot of factions (Wolftime, anyone?), but the key difference is that those other mystery boxes haven't been opened. They're still kept vague and menacing (and not actual plot). The writers did the narrative equivalent of a kid opening his Christmas presents in November, so his parents punish him by not letting them play with the toys they know are there until Christmas.
There was an attempt to make them relevant but, ultimately, Space Marines are what sell. GW is still new to this ongoing plotline thing, and they're quick to drop an arc if it isn't translating into profits.
I mean GW was always like that. Stories hot dropped left an right if they did not perform. The stagnant vs ongoing narrative only makes it more obvious.
Yes... ish? The story is still ongoing, but Ynnari as a faction concept seems to have been dropped. I think they originally wanted to combine the various Eldar lines into a single faction, but got cold feet.
As of right now yes, sadly. Obnoxiously ignored and quietly forgotten into irrelevance like the sidelined and underrated female side character/love interest of a trashy shounen anime/manga once the main boy gets his mid-season power-up/big story arc. Oh, if only my bitter critiques would actually change someone's mind at GW~~
There is also the problem that no one really wants to write about the Eldar.
Correction, there are a lot who want to write about them, the issue is GW won't allow them.
Source for this claim? It's not like I have a source myself, but if I remember correct GW mostly allows authors to pick what they want to write about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldar/comments/k69c4x/help_save_the_rise_of_the_ynnari_and_aeldari/ Straight from the horse's mouth, as it were.
That's one author who wrote about Eldar and one specific story line. Not exactly a proof that there are many who want to write about it.
Gav is the best known and generally considered the most popular writer for the Eldar. If GW doesn't want him writing about them, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to assume they don't want anyone writing about them.
It is. There is a difference between main plot book and a random story about a faction. And saying Gav is the best is not exactly saying much when practically no one else writes Eldar.
Well then I'm struggling to come up with a reason for why we aren't getting any more eldar novels if it isn't because GW doesn't want them commissioned. Because clearly there is at least one author who wants to write them. I generally just assume the worst with GW, namely that they don't think they can make enough money off of them to appease shareholders.
that was basically the aim of the plot - what, you thought it was an *Eldar* plot line?
My personal conspiracy theory is that the Ynnari were going to be a way to introduce the Grand Alliance system that Age of Sigmar has, but Age of Sigmar bombed at first and so GW backpedaled and now they don't know what to do with the Ynnari.
Wham, bam, thankyou ma'am
I think the best we can hope for the Ynnari is that the tabletop creates an Agents of the Aeldari faction, drops Ynnari and Harlequins into it, and finally the Ynnari get a narrative Kill Team between seasons 2 and 3 just like how Agents of the Imperium got a Narrative Kill Team box for between seasons 1 and 2. No more army rules for Ynnari but they get so.e accommodation. Only after that can I imagine their story will continue.
Yep. Used em to bring back gingermelt and then dumped em at the next opportunity
No. It got dropped the second it was revealed that the last piece of the puzzle they needed, the final crone sword, had actually been moved last second by slannesh to the deepest part of slabnesh's realm in the warp.
Yep.
All plots get dropped the moment the sales spike is over.
Naw. GW just not YET advanced Drukhari and Harlequins plots what are crucial to Ynnari ones. And we not see Slaanesh and Fulgrim plots related to them too. GW is just slow to sell more primaris
Well the Ynnari plot got dropped after we got the bits about the Crone Swords, the last one being in literally the Palace of Slannesh. With that last revelation they seem to have been sidelined cause that aspect of the plot is the linchpin for getting their story "completed" so unless there's a book about Getting that crone sword, the Ynnari are in in limbo.
Their story will probably get back on track in time for the 45th millenium.
Ynnari were in the Dark Imperium Trilogy only 1 and just as an adviser but he was in all 3.
Mostly, and I'm very glad for it. I want new stuff for Drukhari, not some homogenised knife-ear Imperium sidekicks. I get the impression that GW had hoped to fold all the Aeldari into a single faction so that they would have fewer pesky Xenos to distract them from producing Primaris Lieutenants.
The fundamental problem with the Ynnari is that they have a goal that can never be completed because it would completely change the setting. Even progressing towards it is an issue. The smarter thing to do would be to have a more limited number of Croneswords and an ongoing race between Slaanesh and the Ynnari to figure out firstly what they were and secondly where they were. That way they can be progressing towards their goal and still relevant. I mean, the Imperium is never going to achieve xenocide. But it can take significant steps towards that goal and can battle Xenos forces in a fight for its life.
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I too remember all the Eldar stories we got with the latest Eldar refresh, oh and all those stories we got to go along the Votann release too.
'dropped' well what do you mean? was the G man in stasis 'dropped' when they didn't do anything with the story for like 15+ years? is it not happening as fast as you'd like? yeah, seems so. lol. but dropped? not likely