Warhammer 40,000 plays with miniatures as much as it does with contradiction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the dreadnought: This animate, gun-laden sarcophagus of the Astartes marks a mainstay on tabletops and a powerful symbol of the Imperium’s refusal to grant peace, even to its own dead. However, despite such glaring grimdarkness, a poignant trend among players has seen dreadnought models being converted into vessels for the remains of beloved companion animals – something I term “petnoughts”.
This talk investigates the conflicting dynamics of power and grief that inhere in such practice by examining the intersection of play, lore, and miniature. In so doing, the petnought becomes characterised as the simultaneous effectuation of Trauerspiel, Playmate, and Plaything. Trauerspiel (German: “mourning play”) describes an improvisatory tactic of mourning, both in terms of adaptive material culture and performative practice. Acknowledging the lack of socially sanctioned cultural mechanisms in Western society to express grief over the death of a companion animal, the playing with its enshrined remains can be considered an intimate coping resource. Just as much, however, the selfsame play remains critically inscribed by the animal’s total subjugation to human mastery. Put differently, within this Trauerspiel, the pet plays a twofold role, split along a similar ideological faultline that characterises dreadnoughts in 40K’s lore: As a Playmate, the petnought retains a form of post-mortem agency within the game’s magic circle. Like the death-defying military subjects of the 41st millennium, whose deep commitment to the Emperor is focalised in stories like Glorious Tomb (Haley 2014), the pet persists on perpetual duty to its loving master. As a Plaything, such emic celebration of undying commitment is counterposed by its etic shadow: the degradation of the individual to an expendable pawn that is reduplicated by the pet’s entrapment within the literal game piece.
Author bio
Dr Max Jokschus works as an academic programme coordinator at the Cooperative University of Saxony (DHSN). He previously worked as a research associate for English Studies at both the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg and the University of Leipzig. He received his PhD from the latter in 2025. His dissertation titled The (Post-)Internet Horror Film: Devils in the Data is currently in preparation for publication with Bloomsbury.
