Viewers usually expect long-lasting transmedia worlds and crossovers between various media to be internally harmonious. In contrast, Warhammer 40,000 provides prospective viewers, players and readers with a universe far less concerned with clarity and consistency. To the audiences of Warhammer 40,000, significant variance in the depictions of characters, places and factions depending on the medium, genre, and the iteration of the tabletop “mother ship” (Baumgartner, 2015) is a given. This instability and incoherence within the storyworld will be explored through a cursory examination of chaos demons using ludic and literary examples. Demonic adversaries assume “rather straightforward roles” (Mäyrä, 2023) within complex ludic configurations in games like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (Relic Entertainment, 2011) and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 (Tindalos Interactive, 2019). Those demons are primarily encountered in and differentiated through their unique ways to threaten or to provide affordances to players. These unambiguous roles of the demonic are to be contrasted against demons and demonic influences in the unstable and nightmare-like storyworld of Requiem Infernal (Fehervari, 2019), in which the categories of the human and the demonic and the textual borders in which they are embedded are shown to be permeable and malleable. This cursory analysis aims to serve as an example of the position occupied by the audiences of Warhammer 40,000. They are positioned as recipients within a transmedia world where central figures such as chaos demons are free to be variable and diverse: the demonic in Warhammer 40,000 encompasses easily describable adversaries with a set of clear functions, indescribably otherworldly forces and ambiguous singular entities in complex, symbiotic relationships with human figures.
Author bio
Leonid Nezhinskiy:
I am a student in the comparative literature master’s program at the at the Free University of Berlin. I received my bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and communication from the Freie Universität Berlin. Beides the study of literature across languages as mandated by our institute, I focus on Game Studies.
