The world's first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer
Games Workshop repeatedly asserts that Warhammer 40,000 is satire, and the setting uses grimdark exaggeration to critique the real world. Many works of satire, especially those in the Juvenalian mode often employed by 40K, view the laying bare of social ills and hidden assumptions to be the ultimate goal. This lines up with Mikhail Bakhtin’s …
The concept of death, as expressed in games and other fictions, is not necessarily negative. It does not play the same role, or pose the same threat, as death for us, in the physical world. But few intellectual properties revel in the exploration of death in the way that the Warhammer 40k setting does. Whether …
Warhammer 40,000 is by the admission of its creators, a satire of Britain in the 1980s. It is a representation of a squalid, sprawling failed empire, where human life has ceased to matter as anything other than oil for the machinery of a broken state. In this talk I will characterise this satire using the …