Brian Niemeier #fundie

Brian Niemeier #fundie brianniemeier.com

Our corporate overlords and their SJW minions have ruined movies, TV, music, stand up comedy, video games, tabletop games, and knitting. Now Warhammer 40k fans are in for a taste of their shrill, forked lash.

[...]

Let the demoniacs have their ill-gotten gains. We don't need them now that indie creators in all fields are hard at work producing fun content that doesn't insult its audience.

Do your part. Support indie science fiction today!

26 comments

Support indie science fiction today!

...but not that which fucks with Worldcon & the SFWA.

Sad Puppies was an unsuccessful right-wing anti-diversity voting campaign intended to influence the outcome of the annual Hugo Awards, the longest-running prize (since 1953) for science fiction or fantasy works

For the 2017 Hugo awards [...] no such campaign was created

Who's the Sad Puppy now, Bri...?!

Indie media is some of the most progressive and "SJW" stuff out there. Even more so then most mainstream works which try for broad appeal. Fail.

Wait, Brian likes Warhammer 40k!? That’s as far from fundie religion removed as scifi can be!

Regardless, while I admit I’m not the biggest fan of SJW’s in general, it is good that fiction keeps moving away from the ol’ stereotypical sausagefest it used to be. More variety is always better. At least, as long as they’re not overcompensating, of course.

Brian you're aware 40K doesn't exactly portray your theocracy you fawn over in a good way right?

Indie science fiction tends to be significantly more inclusive of female, LGBT+, and ethnic minority voices. In particular, it's more open to genuinely radical art rather than the more subdued opposition seen in mainstream stuff. Obviously it's a broad field and that independence also makes it more open to the far-right, but in general, their shit is terrible (even ignoring the ideological issues; it feels a lot more forced, less literary, and less sincere). Having a far-right extremist give a shout out to indie scifi just sounds weird.

Good! AS long as you don’t pull a “Sad Puppies” and start your own Wingnut Sci-Fi Awards thingy.

The Christian Music industry has the Dove Awards. The Porn Industry has the AVN Awards. You can have your weird Alternate Industry thingy.

Face it. The Majority is against you so perhaps you should just get your own enclave (Like the Amish, Ave Maria, FL. or Indonesia’s Aceh Province) or ditch your prejudices join the real world.

Come up with….I dunno….The Beale/Ringo/[any other bigoted author] Awards or whatever.

No one’s stopping you! Make your own stuff! SHEESH!

Diversity has more effect on a game than these whiners realize. I've played a few games in the Star Ocean series and when I got to "Integrity and Faithlessness" something struck me as I gathered the last of my party members and I just couldn't get it out of my mind until I realized what it was that bothered me. Even beyond the complaints that the story was hacked out oversimplified crap that contained none of the twists of previous installments and the somewhat headache inducing shallow references to the other, better games like every single party member basically being an expy of a character from a previous game and nudging you in the ribs non stop to see if you notice once I realized what had been bothering me it felt like the final nail in the coffin. Every single character was human. The Star Ocean universe normally contains a broad spectrum of races from the feline Fellpool to the Eldarians and three eyed Tetragene. Integrity and Faithlessness had NONE of that and the absence was noticeable. The towns seemed like they had half the people missing and the people who were left became a painfully generic amorphous mass. When something you've accepted as part of the world is suddenly gouged out you will notice it and it will feel wrong. And this is a fictional setting, the world is what the creators make it there are no hard and fast rules about what belongs. Trying to edit people out of a real world setting because you don't want them there goes beyond simply wrong. We include sexual and racial minorities in our fiction because like it or not they are there in the real world and ignoring them is a disservice not only to them but to the people trying to immerse themselves in the world being created.

But I suppose the problem for the people complaining is that they refuse to acknowledge what they see intruding in their fantasies as part of the real world around them in the first place. They don't see the blank spots where anything "offensive" to their sensibilities was effaced being filled in with deliberately homogeneous and uninteresting white noise like a more worldly person would. They remove what is organic and interesting and replace it with a manufactured numbness.

@Passerby

Star Ocean five was a lazy game. While SO3 and four had their problems at least they didn't feel like lazy cash grabs.

… Warhammer 40k… the series that created the term ‘grimdark’ and that’s the one this jackoff picks? Seriously? I mean the entire series is filled to the brim with asshole factions who are in shades of just plain awful

You have the Genocidal, Xenocidal, religiously fanatic, incompetently fascist and incredibly nihilistic Imperium that worships their decaying, corpse of an Emperor as a god, said ‘god’ didn’t want to be worshipped in the first mind, that’s foreign policy amounts to ‘kill everyone!’ and if you dare think that maybe, just maybe the decaying corpse isn’t a god, you get kidnapped and tortured until you ‘repent’ for your ‘sin’ of denying the ‘divinity’ of the Emperor and may just as well drop a city-sized nuke on your planet for good measure.

then you have a faction that amounts to a bunch of psychopaths who kill, maim and burned things just for fun in the shape of the green-skinned Orks… AND THAT’S THE COMEDIC FACTION

then you have an old relic of an empire that once dominated the galaxy but became so hedonistic and depraved that they quite literally murder-fucked Slaanesh… the literal god of extreme hedonism… into existence in the form of continent-sized city-ships that is the Craftworld Eldar who will literally burn entire worlds if it means saving a handful of Eldar in the process

then you have the aforementioned ‘cousins’ of the Craftworld Eldar, who continued with the old Eldar Empire’s depravity and extreme hedonism… but have gotten WORSE as the millennium since and they will torture you, maim you, twist you into ways that shouldn’t be possible and ensure that you feel EVERYTHING in such agonizing detail that it will drive you insane all for their own twisted amusement.

THEN you have the faction that amounts to worshiping four SEPERATE GOD-DAMN SATANS who are all sorts of horrible in of themselves ranging from the blood-filled rage and insane rage of Khrone, the always scheming, manipulative and twisted Tzeentch, the decaying and sickly Nurgle and the very embodiment of extreme hedonism that is Slannesh. Worse yet, even if you don’t want to worship ‘the ruinous powers of chaos’ you feed the four chaos gods by virtue of being human because they literally survive off of emotion, negative AND positive.

And the closest thing to a ‘good’ faction in this bleak universe is a faction that uses brainwashing camps and perfectly willing to do absolutely horrible things for the ‘greater good’ which in of itself is incredibly vague and subject to interruption, and there’s the whole fact that they use a strict caste system that the chastes are effectively sub-species now and this is the rising Tau Empire.

I can’t even begin to describe the Tyranids and Necrons…

This is a universe where war is a constant face of life, be it internal and external, this is a bleak setting that I’m really am surprised this guy likes this series…

Let me guess, the Imperium is your utopia.

@Creativerealms

Cash grab I'll definitely agree with, I could almost feel the game rifling through my pockets, but something lazy shouldn't feel like it was putting effort into spitting on me while it did.

@Peacemonger373

“I’m really am surprised this guy likes this series…”

I was too, but something about your description makes a disturbing amount of sense: “You have the Genocidal, Xenocidal, religiously fanatic, incompetently fascist and incredibly nihilistic Imperium that worships their decaying, corpse of an Emperor as a god […] and if you dare think that maybe, just maybe the decaying corpse isn’t a god, you get kidnapped and tortured until you ‘repent’ for your ‘sin’ of denying the ‘divinity’ of the Emperor and may just as well drop a city-sized nuke on your planet for good measure.”

If you put it like that, it kinda looks exactly like the dystopian world the fundies try to realize… As long as you replace “God-Emperor” with “Orange Toad Emperor”, of course.

@Peacemonger373

*BLECH!* How can anyone like that game?! No thanks. I prefer something with at least a little bit of goodness. Even Game of Thrones, for all it’s Grey-Blackness, had characters that were heroic/sympathetic and it ended on a hopeful note.

How anyone could like Warhammer and not find it depressing is anyone’s guess. I feel the same concerning The Walking Dead, which is nothing but a misanthropic slog where every quasi-civilized enclave is run by psychopaths, no origin or known cure for the virus turning folks into ghouls and main characters are constantly dying. No wonder many folks lost interest in that show. Many would watch with the thought in mind that maybe we’ll find how how the protagonists succeed at surviving and the source of the Walker plague or have….SOMETHING….SOME SORT OF RESOLUTION!

This is why I don’t watch TV shows on a regular basis, there’s too many plot developments and finales that are stupid, offensive, grim or whatever (and don’t get me started on shows that get cancelled on a cliffhanger!). Better to wait until the whole shows finished….buy the DVD/BluRay/Video File and apply some Fandom Discontinuity, Video Editing Soft-Ware and/or Fan Fiction. Sometimes it’s as easy that stopping at a point mid-way where it could be a good “Show Finale” or at the last good season (Like buying only Seasons 1-7 of the Simpsons).

An example with me….I pretend the Six-Part British miniseries Taking Over The Asylum ends at Ep. 3….The saved the radio station and stuck it to “The Man”….the ending we need in these dark times! WE need morale!

Many of these big complex sagas are not planned out ahead of time and written by the seat of the pants. LOST fans found out the hard way.

While fans constantly complaining is no doubt annoying, it’s still is understandable why there are complainers. Even I, despite loving the new Star Wars Trilogy, see a lot a things that needed some tweaking….like it’s constant wasting of fascinating bit characters….I wanna see those Space Pirates fighting Han & Chewie (while plagued by rathtars)! I want Phasma being an evil badass! I want more DJ the Space Slicer! I want backstory on Snoke! I want more scenes with Lt. Mitaka as the beleaguered F.O. Officer! Really STOP WASTING CHARACTERS! Even the physical nature of Starkiller base greatly stretch my suspension of disbelief (from a physics, geological, gravitational, astronomical, etc. standpoint)!

@Peacemonger373

The orks were modelled after Scotish football hools, if I recall, from some old timey interview with rick Priestly. Tbh dunno if the Scots used to be worse than Poles, in the football hooligan area but just from my own experience in the old country, I can tell you that the way they act is spot on. Legia’s hools are very much orks in everything but the skin tone(hell I used to know a couple that actually played 40k orks, talk about match made in heaven).

@Spuki wh40k is primarily a tabletop wargame, it’s not designed as a generic setting, all these brutal factions have some crazy nice looking models for them you paint and field. There’s tournaments and big events, this thing is a sport unto itself. I should know, I used to have some fame with that, back in Poland. In the end 40k’s a specific type of parody but there are other good, popular wargames without the schtic, the fantasy warh, tends to be less of an utter grimdark, there’s Warmachine(the setting is called Iron Kingdoms), that one you’d prolly like more, since there are actual “good guys” factions there. Then there’s Infinity(or at least used to be, dunno if the system exists anymore in official capacity), which was a VERY vibrant and colourful depiction of a near future cyberpunk/sci-fi in some anime-ish vein. TBH I’m not a big fan of 40k specifically these days, the grimdark atmosphere can get somewhat tedious and the ruleset gets worse and worse, with each edition, so I just dropped it at some point. If anything, I’d get my Warmachine army back, if I had the resources to actually play wargames nowadays.

@SpukiKitty

I’m not the biggest fan either, but as Skide said, WH40k is above all a tabletop game, with the whole background being mostly there to flesh out the factions and explain why they’re (perpetually) at war. Afaik, it’s not meant to actually tell decent stories, if any stories really. Which, tbh, is good, as WH40k is such and incredibly dark and depressing and nihilistic place it ranks at the absolute bottom of my “fictional universes I’d like to live in”. Which is saying something, as I think even things like Bleach’s world (if you really analyze it) or the World of Darkness are more pleasant places to live in.

P.S.: “I want Phasma being an evil badass” Don’t we all? I’d love to actually see her really do something in E9, if she even appears. But I can see E9 doing either one of two things: Blow everyone away with sheer awesomeness, or be a let-down. You can’t believe how much I want it to be the former.

@Peacemonger373

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

I was unaware that real men enjoy knitting.

I think that was his idea of a joke. A really bad joke.

@Timjer
I’m thinking of creating an Alternate-Continuity version of the Sequel Trilogy that roughly follows the canon but with a number of changes. I could be enjoyed along with or in lieu of the canon.

I like what Abrams & Johnson were trying to say with these stories with the themes and concepts (that a lot of haters miss) but there’s just some stuff where I think they should’ve done things differently….

* Have the Rathtar scene focus on Han vs. The Gangs rather than Rey rescuing Finn (we already had a big introductory action scene showing Rey & Finn, Han & Chewie need a big introductory action scene). Rey & Finn can briefly encounter Tasu-Leech and Bala-Tik (Rey’s security-cam/Force-rescue of Finn can be replaced by Rey totally destroying the super-nigh-undefeated street-fighter, Tasu-Leech in a fight).
* Have Finn fight Phasma (that ‘Traitor!’ scene) on Takodana. She bests him, Han blasts her but she survives due to her super-armor.
* Phasma’s final moments in Ep. 8 play out like that cut scene and she returns in Ep. 9 as a cyborg.
* More of Benicio del Toro’s DJ! He could return in Ep. 9 to pull a reverse of what he did last time….getting hired by and betraying the First Order. WE may even find out his name.
* More backstory for Snoke. The novels hinted at an intriguing backstory concerning Leia knowing Snoke all along, Snoke’s vendetta against Luke, Snoke’s role in the founding of the F.O. (and what became of Grand Admiral Raye Sloane), Snoke’s injuries, etc. I’d also make his robe less ridiculous and his personality consistent (He went from calm and calculating to cartoonishly hammy).
* I’ll make Lt. Mitaka an actual supporting character….he gets captured by the resistance, becomes an item with Lt. Connix and defects (I just like the idea of adorable Lieutenants from opposite sides getting together).
* Admiral Ackbar survives but spends much of Ep. 8 in the sickbay (hence, Holdo). He escapes with the other transports before he tearfully gives Holdo permission to Kamikaze The Supremacy.
* Starkiller isn’t a hollowed-out planet that sucks energy from it’s own sun! It’s ludicrous on so many levels from a scientific standpoint! Rey, Finn & Kylo would need heavy-duty spacesuits to fight in the forest! MY take on Starkiller will be a base on a planet (that controls things and stores energy) and two probes (one shoots, the other gathers star-energy from father away.) Vermisllitude, people!

….and a bunch of other stuff.

@SpukiKitty

Oh, I like the sequels too (much more than the haters, for usre), but I agree that some things could have been done differently. Some of your ideas aren’t that bad, and I certainly agree we have to/need to know the backstory of the FO and how Sloane got replaced by Snoke. That’s just too big of a deal to ignore.

As for your Ackbar idea, on one hand I fully support it, but from what I heard his death was because the original actor from RTOJ had also passed away, which I understand. Still, he could have gotten a much better send-off than just outright “Kirk”-ing him, you know.

—

…Sorry everyone, we’re kinda getting of topic here.

@Timjer

Glad you agree. Surely, they could have hired another guy who could do an awesome Ackbar voice.

I also understand that the Gangster/Rathtar scene was probably done the way it was because….

* Badass cool baddies turning out to be useless against tentacled monsters was likely a sort of joke.
* JJ like to troll people (‘Let’s get the THE RAID guys and have them be a nothingburger!’).
* Harrison Ford is old and he busted his foot so he couldn’t run around too much.

….But Pablo Hildago’s backstories for The Guavians and Kanjiklub is too cool! The Guavian Enforcers sound terrifying and the Kanjiklub hailing from a colony of former slaves that overthrew their Hutt masters is awesome!

Plus, I have a STILL have a Supremacy-sized crush on that Bala-Tik guy….
image
….I want moar of that boyishly cute Guavian boy and his deep, rich, majestic, Scottish brogue!

Come to SpukiKitty, you lithe little elfin-faced punker-boy….come to Cougar-Mama!….

Actor Brian Vernel has a special sort of sexy, boyish, elfin ugly-cute and his voice is pure sex….even if I have NO INTEREST in watching any of his other stuff. He’s one of those cases where the actor is more interesting than the roles he’s in.

@SpukiKitty:

I like most of your ideas but I have to disagree with your changes to Starkiller Base. Starkiller Base was really cool. But I never liked it's role the plot. Episode 7 was basically just a big pile recycled plot elements. We already had the ragtag rebellion vs. the big evil empire in the original trilogy. I wanted something different this time around. Oh well. The movie was fun enough to make me like it. I just wish they'd've tried harder on the plot.

There is one version of Warhammer that’s a little more pleasant…

image

Yeah but Muchkin games tend to be funny so it would be lighter. But I would wager that's darker than most SJ games and GURPS

@Skidie:
Actually, GW’s greenskins are English football hooligans, not Scottish ones. Their accent is an exaggerated version of Cockney, a South English lower class dialect.

Brian Niemeier #fundie brianniemeier.com

26 comments

Confused?