#I say characters I mean ingsoc

[wahbegan]

For the most part, i stay out of social 40k discourse with a handwave and an "it's not that deep", because i truly can't be arsed and i'm too old to be getting into arguments on the internet anymore. But i'm stuck on the shitter for the second time today, and i was thinking about it, and the thing is, i think people just misinterpret 40k.

A lot of people reduce it down to "there are no good guys," but what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything to the average person, there's obviously someone you're supposed to root for. And, i will admit, based on GW's marketing, it's clearly the Imperium. Now, GW's marketing of the Imperium and Space Marines the uncomplicated good guys is a whole 'nother topic, but i don't think it's deliberately malicious. It is lazy and disingenuous and profit-driven, but i don't think it's pushing an agenda.

The thing, when people say "there are no good guys in 40k," here's what they mean. The main players are theocratic genocidal fascists, literal demons from actual Hell, a society of space elves that got so debased and amoral and hedonistic they blood orgied a malefic God into existence (some of them regret it and split with the rest, but the BEST of them will commit absolute genocide against people they know are innocent and have no beef with to save just one of their own kind), what i can only describe as uhhh alien Ingsoc from 1984, the very first Imperialists in existence back from the dead to re-conquer and enslave the galaxy, aaand then just fucking orcs in space and xenomorphs.

All of them do horrible things, all have horrific goals, all of them treat war crimes as an Olympic sport and baby, they're going for gold. But you get books from all their points of view (well, not the xenomorph or orc things, they kinda wrote themselves into a corner with that one), and they all have nuance. They all think they're the good guys. They all have solid points and do heroic things as well as awful ones. Yes, even the demons from Hell and their cultists. One of my favorite characters, who had the potential to be one of the best people in the setting, is a literal blood red flying rage monster who kills worlds on a whim.

And that is the FUN of 40k!! There are no heroes, but you're up to your taint in interesting, complex, and well-written anti-villains. There's so much nuance, and besides that, it's kinda like the real world. There is no such thing as a good country. All factions of human existence, all societies, have done awful things either to their own people, to other societies, or both. The Imperium is satirically shitty and evil. They make no effort to hide that. That doesn't mean every Imperial soldier and Space Marine is.

I make jokes all the time about-not really jokes-about hating England. And it's true! I do hate England. England, as an institution, is pure fucking evil and has been since.....uh, forever? Forever, i reckon. That doesn't i'm incapable of finding any story about English soldiers non-compelling. I mean it's a bit harder cause they're real, but if you put them in space fighting demons-you get the idea.

Some people are incapable of that, and i get that. If you're looking for someone to root for without a bunch of subclauses and disclaimers about the bits you DON'T root for, if you're looking for someone where you're going to co-sign all of their bullshit, if you want a protagonist with similar morals to you, if violence on a genocidal-to-apocalyptic scale is something casually bandied about by everyone as a matter of course bothers you, yeah, it's not the setting for you.

It's very much a product of its time, that 80s-90s edgelord phase Western culture had, but i love that about it, and i love the way it crafts this dystopian garbage society and still creates compelling characters within it.

Is some of the marketing and visual design possibly irresponsible, based on how much you wanna lay at the feet of the company and how much you wanna lay it on "it's the audience's job to interpret this and not use the silly space-men blowing up aliens as some kinda weird pathetic fucking justification for antisemitism"? Sure, we can have that debate.

But it's definitely not what it's often painted as by people who are unacquainted with it, which is like OUR HEROES ARE NAZIS YOU SHOULD LOVE THEM

[east-germany]

Christ alive I made my lil fuckin 1984 self insert have a streak of white hair as a joke cuz ive found like two white hairs ever but nooo I gotta have my hair turning white at this tender age even more send help I'm not ready to be dilf-coded!

[discountskeppy]

communalist and moralism for the ask game ^-^

YESSS ty anon i love these guys so dearly

[communalism]

Sexuality + Gender Headcanon: breaking the mold to combine these two because i think they have canonical gender+sexuality stuff. and they said theyre like pansexual pangender whatever. i forget what they are but i like agree with them

A ship I have with said character: im like. a real commoralism ride or die ok. its like such the obvious thing and was hardly even a thing in canon but. in my made up verision of realicide in my head where its actually good they are very. dlsjfkhdfkjsdhfsd

A BROTP I have with said character: like i said in my darw thing, all the off the compasses NEED to be besties NOW!!!!! also this isnt rlly a brotp im just spilling thoughts but i think in like an au where centricide and realicide are the same universe. theyd try to be besties with the leftists (but would prolly get sad cuz the leftists are MEAN!!!)

A NOTP I have with said character: again, like i said in my darw thing. them and darw is just BLEGH. also ive seen communalism and ingsoc as a ship around a bit and i dont really care for that either lol. maybe im just too much of a commoralism diehard

A random headcanon: i think they like. collect a lot of things. like i can imagine their room with like a buncha dumb lil stuffed animals and like. anime figures. i think theyd like madoka magica

General Opinion over said character: VERY COOL also had a lot of potential (however i think the original route they were gonna go with cultcom, where like their soul is all rescued cuz moralism gets resurrected is. kind of bad i dont like it but thats a different plate of cookies for another glass of milk)

[moralism]

Sexuality Headcanon: like, vaguely mlm. bi? gay? idk. he likes men tho. like he uses the achillean flag in all his picrew pfps

Gender Headcanon: transmasc! maybe a hint of nonbinaryism? like idk he has a he/they pronouns in bio kind of vibe

A ship I have with said character: to reiterate, COMMORALISM FTWWWWWWW im like cray ok. its like commoralism or nothing 4 me

A BROTP I have with said character: him + the realists are rlly cool. im not too invested in the other realists so like give me a month or so to become crazy abt them and ill prolly expand on my thoughts more

A NOTP I have with said character: i dont he has any ships besides commoralism? so. i wouldnt say i have a notp for them rlly

A random headcanon: i think he would be like. a local public library fiend ok. he walks there like every day and has like. a gay little coffee and tote bag. just vision it.

General Opinion over said character: I LIKE HIM A LOTTT ik i wasnt writing like paragraphs for him like ive done for other characters but i really do like him. hes rlly cool, and like i said i dont rlly like his whole ressurrected plot he was gonna have i still think it wouldve been interesting to see

[reg1ment]

you've probably answered this before but tell me about ur political ideology show/boyfriend for someone who has literally no idea whats going on?

dont worry i love talking about him very much so i dont mind at all!!

i have two political ideology boyfriends now lmfao but you probably mean my main boy, ingsoc so i will talk about him

basically his source is the web series Realicide, a lighthearted yet edgy kinda slice of life series about two groups of (humanized) political ideologies (the realists and anti-realists) who are determined to stop the others from gaining too much influence. that makes it sound way more plot driven than it really is, its mostly memes to be honest

you may know ingsoc's ideology from the classic dystopian novel 1984 and theres a lot of references to it in his design/personality. he's a very cold, stoic and intimidating person and it also shows in the way he talks. like it would be creepy if his accent wasnt so pretty /hj however it's shown in the series he's not uncaring and looks out for the wellbeing of the others. just maybe dont insult him to his face

thats all i really have to say uhh i care him very much and hes a really cool character in general. thanks for asking i enjoyed this very much!!

[yradwan-stuff]

Law and Order

The extreme totalitarian regime presented in 1984 uses the character WInston, an average Joe in a much larger system that he can’t even fathom and will die not wanting to understand. Winston is a mere representation of how cruel and effective a totalitarian regime can be. I only say effective because the ones in power will indefinitely remain in power, and the way they run things will always proceed as planned. The sad part is the story isn’t really about Winston which makes him as insignificant as INGSOC and Big Brother makes him out to be, and makes the idea of a regime as extreme as this even more daunting. The better focal point of the story is how “The Party” was able to establish a regime that inevitably drove Winston to truly believe that two plus two equals five after being tortured for information by The Ministry of Love and his boss who tricked Winston into joining a fake rebellion. No one is allowed to live or love, everyone is under constant surveillance, and people are either corrected, or vaporized and forgotten for the most trivial of transgressions.

History was a lot different in this world, the effects of modernism turned the early 20th century into a bloodbath with the world fighting for power, which inevitably ended with nuclear war decimating almost everything. After a period of civil unrest three superpowers rose all establishing similar totalitarian regimes. Russia invaded Europe and became Eurasia under a the ideology of Neo-Bolshevikism, and after a decade of fighting within itself China became Eastasia under the ideology The Obliteration of the Self. After the war the US and Great Britain joined together and became one country along with Canada, South Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand was now Oceania. What used to be western civilization went through a civil war between capitalism and a new homegrown ideology, and this ideology won and formed to a single party known as INGSOC. The three superpowers at that point are always in a state of war over an area in the world called the equatorial front. For the people of Oceania, even though this happens over the course of decades it might as well have happened thousands or millions of years ago since anything before INGSOC isn’t even a memory, and simply didn’t exist.

The story takes place in Great Britain, but people who live there have only known it as Airstrip 1. The party’s grip on the mind is so strong that what was an unquestionable fact, like a name, is now a faint dream, and they start questioning if it really happened, then they simply forget. The control of information is INGSOC’s most prominent attribute because facts are not equal to reality, and reality can be changed whenever INGSOC and Big Brother wants it to. INGSOC didn’t just change society, they destroyed it completely, and remade it into something where only it can thrive, like a parasite.

“The Party” isn’t even considered as part of society because technically it is it’s own society that exists within society, they have their own culture, rules, and traditions. It really has to worry about its own stability in order to survive. In a way it’s like the human body, where it purges any harmful elements, although in this case they purge the educated and those who aren’t wholeheartedly loyal to the ideology. Mass purges occurred in the 50’s and 60’s within the party where INGSOC removed every threat of the old world in order to solidify itself among fanatic new supporters. This way INGSOC is able to monopolize information, history, and facts. There are three main classes in Oceania’s society, one is the Inner Party, the secretive heads of state, which is 2%, the Outer Party, the still devoted educated and bureaucrats, which is 13%, and then there are the Proles which is everyone else, and it’s where Winston is on the hierarchy. The Proles are the uneducated masses and are easy to manipulate whether it be by nationalistic pandering or to create a fake crisis. The Inner & Outer Party control four ministries, housed in pyramids that tower the London skyline, there is the Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, and the Ministry of Plenty. The Ministries of Love and Truth are the most important because they are the pillars that maintain INGSOC’s ideology from being questioned. The Ministry of Truth destroys or rewrites history and facts, and the Ministry of Love “recorrects” anyone who question these “facts”, or they just disappear.

The way that George Orwell describes this process, is that over the decades the party was able to normalize attributes that haven’t existed in the west for centuries such as class divide, uneducation, and mass atrocities and censorship by state. These attributes were allowed to exist because anyone who didn’t agree with it was too unimportant, or is already dead. Then these attributes were solidified with youthful and nationalistic young adults to the point where children would report their parents for thought crimes. Thought crimes are any ideas that goes against the established ideology, and one can literally cease to exist for committing one, and I mean literally. This isn’t like having a coworker disappear, but completely forgetting that coworker even existed in the first place. Even the mention of someone who has disappeared by a family member or a loved one is also considered a thought crime. INGSOC basically breaks down language into little bits in order to make debate controllable or refutable which gives them a monopoly on political discourse because it made the words up. This goes beyond a weird language since the brainwashing is a cultural manifestation that goes into each individual mindset. Bureaucrats can change reality and history as they please because they are aware that no one will think about. This idea is called doublethink which is a newspeak term where individuals hold two conflicting beliefs, and believing both of them equally. The best example of this is the ongoing war between the three superpowers where the party claims that they have always been at war with Eurasia even if they had claimed beforehand that they were always at war with Eastasia, and people simply accept these changes as reality.

All this raises the question of INGSOC as a political party because it’s definitely not Green Party. INGSOC is a pure product of doublethink. Officially it’s a socialist because it teaches that the days before the revolution were horrendous with average citizen having to literally bow down to the capitalists. At the same time INGSOC hates socialists and this is openly admitted by everyone, but no one sees anything wrong with that, and that’s the power of doublethink. This ideology isn’t that different from that of Eurasia or Eastasia, all three superpowers basically have similar regimes, and continuous relationship between them is war. War is what runs the world, it’s what allows these nations to survive, and is used as propaganda against the uneducated masses. The thing is these nations aren’t even fighting over resources or power, but are simply fighting over nothing. The equatorial front is basically an arena, that belongs to no one, for the three nations to fight and dispose of built up economic waste. Borders are always shifting, countless soldiers die, and natives are enslaved and transferred between the three countries to work for the war machine which continues the cycle. They can just nuke each other and attack actual homelands, but that disrupts the balance of power, so they constantly fight over territory they don’t want in order to keep what they do have, nationalism and monopoly on information. This is a consistent theme in the story that information and its control are important. Everything INGSOC does is in order maintain the ignorance and manipulation among the masses. Orwell also shows how hard it is for a society or an individual to actually reach this state.

District 9 is probably the most realistic representation of how humans would treat extraterrestrial life on a social level. The film starts by showing a huge alien ship hovering over Johannesburg, and later humans get on the ship and make contact with the aliens, or prawns, to find out that their ship stopped working, they are destitute, and have nowhere else to go. The government allowed the prawns to take refuge in an isolated camp, that inevitably turned to slums, for them. The film follows Wikus who’s an oblivious, aloof, and generic bureaucrat who works with alien affairs to maintain relationships with the prawns. Wikus undergoes an accident when he opens an alien vial and ingests a foreign substance that slowly changes him into one of the prawns. Throughout the movie he arches from being one of the bad guys into being the hero as he helps save the lives of a prawn and his son that have a way to get the mothership off planet and back to their home world.

The prawns are essentially an extra-terrestrial, space faring race of biologically insectoid sentient beings. They’re more advanced than human beings regarding their technological and engineering capabilities. The species is bipedal, they’re much taller than humans, and are covered with a tough exoskeleton. They’re carnivorous but seem to like cat food because it has the same effect on them that catnip has on cats, and they’ve even seem to develop an addiction which is exploited by humans traded it for valuable alien tech. They’re also much stronger than humans and are seen easily tearing human limbs. They’re technology is biomechanical, and only functions with prawn DNA.

The film is an allegory to apartheid in South Africa with District 9 named after District 6 which was in real life an only white zone after all the natives were forced from their homes and had to live in Cape Flats which then turned into slums. The prawns are an intelligent life form that are mistreated throughout the movie. Overtones of racism and oppression are riddled throughout the plot. The prawn’s community is over policed, and humans use excessive force to keep prawns in line, and it really highlights how cruel humans can be to one another. The prawns are treated as subhuman which is interesting because certain people are also treated as subhuman, so having the prawns there in order to represent an even further divide is interesting. The film also shows that communities such as this become violent due to these communities being isolated, being treated as though they don’t belong in the outside world, and how they’re represented in the media. When any sentient conscious creature is treated and seen as a criminal for long enough, there is a high possibility that that group of people will start to conform to these ideas, and start believing them as well. There was more crime being committed by the prawns the more over policed their community became. The plot also takes an ironic turn where Wikus becomes more humane the less he becomes human.

Over 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the US and 9% are in private prisons. In the 1980’s state penitentiaries were reaching capacity, and they simply couldn’t afford to take in anymore inmates. That’s when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) came in made deals with state governors to save the state some money. Tom Beasley, one of the cofounders of the CCA stated “You just sell prisons like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers.” In 2015 the CCA made over $1.7 billion dollars. The funny thing is that they don’t even save the taxpayers money, and they cost about the same as a government run facility. According to one study in the University of Wisconsin, private prisons also give twice the infractions as state prisons, and they can lengthen an inmate's sentence, which means the prisons profit more. Private prisons basically make more money when there are more prisoners since they sneak occupancy clauses into their contracts that require states to keep their prisons full. In Arizona the state was unable to meet the 97% quota and had to pay MTC a $3 million fine. It’s fines like this that incentivize states to keep people in prisons as long as possible.

[amorremanet]

George Orwell: My main character is straight Winston Smith: *regularly associates M/F sex with violence, death, and murder; spends the entire first section and then some assuming that Julia, his alleged love interest, is an agent of the Thought Police and being uncertain whether he is attracted to her or wants to kill her so she can’t rat him out to said Thought Police for reasons that are, at best, ill-defined at this point in the novel* George Orwell: Yep, he is totally heterosexual Winston Smith: *rhapsodizes about O’Brien at every available opportunity; is inspired to engage in subversive thinking and potentially revolutionary activities because he’s so sure that O’Brien is also against Big Brother, Ingsoc, and the Party; constantly thinks about O’Brien in suspicious proximity to thinking about both sex and Julia; writes his secret subversive diary with O’Brien in mind as his target audience, despite knowing next to nothing about him; has more positive and conventionally romantic-seeming thoughts about O’Brien than Julia* George Orwell: Haha, such a good hetero Me: Are you sure about that, Eric. I mean… are you really, really sure about that? George Orwell: Well, yeah, she had become a physical necessity, lmao am i right Me: I’m just saying, if you write a character who associates M/F sex with death and seems more like he wants to kiss a dude than his lady alleged love interest — with the biggest difference in terms of canonicity being that you tell us that he hates Julia and thinks about killing her because he wants to fuck her, while O’Brien gets no such treatment because you take heterosexuality for granted — then that looks pretty not-hetero, mate Me: Furthermore, if you do all of this while going on and on about the Party’s regulation of and prohibitions placed on love, sex and sexuality, and most relationships, and about how the Party kills people for falling in love with each other and acting on those feelings, and about how you have to hide your love and your desire if you want to survive — all of which LGBTQ people have had to deal with IRL, which you damn well knew bc you ratted out fellow students whom you suspected of being gay while you were at university — then I feel like you surrender the right to be shocked that LGBTQ people can identify so much with your story Me: Put that together with how you handle all of Winston’s messed up feelings about romance, sex, and sexuality, and I’m reasonably certain that you don’t actually have a leg to stand on and that Winston Smith is pretty damn gay George Orwell: Me: George Orwell: Me: George Orwell: lmao, she had become a physical necessity, am i right :) Me: No, Eric. No, you’re not. Go sit down before you hurt yourself.

[artemisreads]

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

First published in 1949 (and by Penguin in 2003), Nineteen Eighty Four is available as a Penguin Classic for just under 10 Australian dollars in most Australian bookstores and online. Usually content warning are at the end but given that I discuss them in the review I’m putting them above the cut. Warning for torture, death and rape.

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arm reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

‘she’s beautiful’ he murmured.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

A novel of ‘what could have been’, this novel follows the perfectly unremarkable Winston Smith (remarkably subtle name choice there...) as he lives within a totalitarian system of English Socialism (or Ingsoc). Coming into power during WWII, altering the past to align with what the omnipresent Party do today, he displays aptitude for his job despite secret inner feelings of hatred towards them and their ever watching figure head Big Brother. He meets Julia and despite immediately hating her, to the point of wanting to rape and kill her because she was young and pretty and he would never have her, they end up having a secret love affair with the knowledge that it will one day ruin them.

The backbone of good writing is good characters, you may not like them, but it’s an author’s job to make sure you know them, maybe not everything, but understand at least the way they act. They are the eyes through which you view their world. This is usually helped along by the situation characters find themselves in, and indeed it is easy to understand the way Winston acts in such an austere environment. His questioning, his fear, are very relatable. And then there’s Julia. Julia does not read as a character meant to be relatable or sympathised with, if she can be called a character at all. She is an accessory. Winston’s limited reflection on Julia places her attitude to life within Oceania beneath his, she sees the Party as immutable, but finds ways to take pleasure and exist within it without ever wondering why. Why is Winston’s biggest question, why would the Party be like this? Why does the Party exist at all? He tells Julia she is ‘only a rebel from the waist down’, and she finds this ‘terribly witty’ and we’re left wondering why Julia is so engaged by the common man (and I do mean common) embodied by Winston.

But even Winston questions Julia’s motives, why should she be interested in him? He is old, ugly and somewhat sickly. The simple answer is the one Julia gives, she doesn’t care about any of that, presumably because she just likes sex and human connection and doesn’t really care who gives it, and that Winston is special because he sees through the Party, but the truest answer is because Orwell has written a symbol of all an average (but enlightened and therefor above average) man wants and expects to find. She performs as the perfect citizen for the Party without believing in what it says, and in doing so becomes the perfect woman in Winston’s eyes, being young and attractive didn’t hurt either. I do not think Orwell intended Julia to be an object, in the way that many men think they don’t think of women as objects, but still consider them a single monolith or maybe imagine a few archetypes they all fit into.

This book is far older than me, written in a not so different, but rawer climate just after WWII, so I remind myself to be bit more gentle than I usually would in regards to Winston’s general reflection and philosophising on the world, the nature of the past and its ability to be mutable, and immutable at the same time (which is only a problem to spend literally most of your adult life wondering about if you never take your head out of your arse to consider that things happen whether you know about them or not, and you KNOW this, because you know the Party, and it’s your job to change records people will never see and write stories about people who never existed and no one will ever hear of, except your superior. But I’m rambling.). I am sure that when this book was first published it was considered an important and intelligent work, and indeed there are some (but not all) agreeable and important messages regarding being critical of the government, and what seems heavy handed and so pointedly obvious now might have actually been new and powerful, but the way Orwell uses women is infuriating. They are not people, ever, only things to be remarked upon, and most of the time, hated.

As a woman, in the 21st century, Orwell’s and his character Winston’s musings are a bit unbearable. If Winston Smith had a tumblr, most of his posts would be reblogged with the “it’s not that deep” picture attached. If he had a reddit, I’m told he’d be linked to the ‘I’m 14 and this is deep’ thread. The quoted passage opener, written in stark contrast to the totalitarian Party’s erasure of sex and human connection, goes on for a bit more than two pages, with Winston comparing this woman to Julia, and then just ‘philosophising’ over just her for a bit longer. The passage revels in the ‘natural’ beauty of a woman allowed to fulfil her natural function and role within life, making children and being a caretaker and maid for eternity, which is very strange, because this is what women of the Party are meant to do as well, but in a clinical joyless way. Winston is personally offended by the way his wife flinches from his touch, but insists on once a week ‘doing her duty to the Party’. As it turns out Orwell may have been right about it not mattering what kind of government is in charge, women will always be treated as objects in nature rather than fully human persons participating actively in the world.

This book is a man’s account of what it might be like to be a man under totalitarian socialism, presented as a cautionary tale and deep reflection of political unrest, that should ordinary but aware men let power become too absolute there can be no revolution. It seems to say it is important to be critical and aware of your governments actions (and that all governments are more or less the same, no matter the ideology), but also gives the impression that there is nothing that one can do with this knowledge, which seems rather weak for such a revolutionary book.

Winston has a small deep seated sense of being incomplete, like there is more to life than being kept on the edge of poverty and being employed by the party who keep it that way, but doesn’t do much about it except drink, until he meets Julia. The horrendous way the Party keeps power, and the constant knowledge that anyone you know, at any moment, may suddenly cease to exist (in society at least, they all know the person now exists in a cell being tortured and brainwashed and then maybe killed) doesn’t seem to touch him any more than as a nagging feeling that surely, life has been, and could be better, than it is. This resigned attitude removes us from the power of what is happening, it makes what the Party does seem less horrible. Intellectually we know that what is happening is bad, but Winston’s view, and Orwell’s writing, make it hard to feel. I’m a sensitive person, I grieve over fictional happenings a lot -I still wonder if the girls from Saddle Club grew into people that they wanted to be, but this book did not make me feel. Even when I turn the books happenings to true events (particularly East Germany during the cold war) I do not feel the horror or shock at being taken from your bed into a cellar and tortured for weeks.

As I stated before, I’m sure this book was gripping and powerful in its day, but I have read (and will review) other books dealing with similar themes of government control, socialism v capitalism, and the feeling of being a powerless citizen that are much more visceral and poignant.

I’d only recommend this book to a male libertarian (if I for some reason wanted to let him continue feeling smug in his knowledge that all governments are bad and not remind him women are people) or if I knew you very well and we wanted to have a groan filled gossip book review date, which I am open to, by the way.