Flame Wars: Necron Showdown & The Importance of Theme

Ladies and Genitalias, in this corner is the long time champion, the horrors of the deep, Old-Crons!

*Silence*

In the next corner, the newly written and a direct translation of khemri into 40K, New-Crons!

Thank you, We, the Necrons, bring you plenty
of wealth and lore that you can work with,
we like to thank our great writer Matt Ward and...

Stop talking.

To me, the theme of the universe was the driving thing for 40K. 40K isn't the most original or most cleverly developed universe out there. 40K is a winner by being a complete grim&dark jerk off material.

Imperium a fascist, religious dictatorship. Aliens are mostly self-serving asshole and don't care about anyone else. Every other race is a doomday event by themselves.

However the main theme of 40K is War. Eternal, unending, total War. Like 1984 really, where war never ends but with more over the top scope.

In 40K everything is a few grades bigger than their logical counterparts. Space Marines are bigger, guns are larger and everything is huge.

In other Hard-Scifi stories war is a tool rather than the mean, in 40K the war is the mean. Everything in 40K has root in war.

Eldar has aspects that are just types of war. Tau is the old expensionist asian culture much like the WW2 Japanese Empire. Orks conduct war in the most practical sense with no ideology or other bullshit. Every aspect of Imperium is designed to further the cause of war. Even the religion openly supports war without any sugar coating such as "This is a religion of peace.". Peace? Peace? Now that makes me mad. Tyranid is the most agressive version animals can get, eat, produce, eat more. Oldcrons are death incarnate, they want to sterilize the galaxy. Dark Eldar are sadistic and Chaos is anarchy.


Also the themes of each race is unique in it's own right:

Waaagh & Scrap-Engineering

Faith & Women

Duty & Sacrifice

Superiority & Honour

Devouring & Evolution

Anarchy & Chaos

Extinction & Mystery

Communism & Expansion

Imperium: Militaristic Fascism & Human Supremacy

Perversion & Cruelty

Horror & Death

So how does the New-Crons fit in?

They gather slaves like Dark Eldar.
They are ancient and have fancy technology like the Eldar.
They're expensionist like Tau.
And that's pretty much it.

Other than new characters and some new units the entire theme of Necrons is butchered.

C'tans are created from the primordial
energies of the universe and feed on
the power of the stars. For this they are
called Star Vampires in 3rd Edition Codex.
Once they gain their material bodies they
find out that living souls are just as tasty.

It is horrifying that some ancient Star Vampire Gods are awakening and want to harvest your soul. But now the C'tan Shards are just another weapon of the Necrons. C'tans are kept in pokeballs called Shard and when the overlord wants they are released onto their enemies. How they get back the C'tan into the pokeball is a mystery to me.

Let's look where the Oldcrons come from first, so we can understand the theme better.

The amazingly original idea of Necrons comes from various sources:

Necrons themselves are Terminators in all regards.
They are machines.
They want to kill humans.
They are hard to put down.
They will be back.

Everyone knows that Egyptian Pyramids, Stonehenge, Mesoamerican pyramids are all built by the same ancient alien race that might be Atlantians or Greys depending on your conspiracy trip. Or maybe they ARE grey atlantians. God damn! We are reveling in truth here. Give me five days an I reveal God's own name.

C'tans are C'thulhu.
They are ancient aliens.
They sleep for millions of years undergound.
When they rise, you are fucked.
They see you nothing more than ants to abuse.

The theme of necrons is nihilistic. It means that the default state of the universe is dead and life is just a minor annoyance to the great scheme of things. Amazingly powerful and giant beings like C'tans or C'thulhu mean that us humans are unimportant.

The most popular western idea about our place in the universe is a massive ego-masturbation.
God that is the amazingest thing ever and created the universe ONLY for us. And we are made in his IMAGE.
Then he populated the surface with plants and animals for US. And the evil deamons are evil because
they rejected US. They are OUR enemy and try to corrupt OUR souls.

So the entire thing is designed with us humans in the spotlight of all creation. The nihilistic horror stories usually center around the insignificance of humans. There is billions of stars out there and we are like a grain of sand in a desert.

In the older times(i.e. greek), people used to think that monsters and gods live close by. Because those places were hard to traverse or reach.

Atop the mountains

On islands

In the forests

And then we went to those places and found no gods, so we had to come up with newer myths. This was mainly the age of colonization and the settlement of the new world. Which led western people to Australia, Indonesia, Americas and various islands which were not explored before.

Travelling to once unreachable lands expanded our idea of the world.
World was once just europe, now it was the World as we know it today.

People fantasized that there are amazing
places of riches and loot.

This also led to pirate fantasizes where there are amazing islands and places filled with
interesting tribal people which are not christian. Only seafaring people would find these
places and grab the booty.

You really cant blame those people, Incas, Indians, Americans and Africans were really distinct in their culture from the British, French and Spanish at that point. So it's only logical that they were amazed by these cultures that pierce their skin, eat bugs or sacrifice humans to appease their sun god.

Time passed and the technology became ever more stronger.

From wooden ships we moved to metalic monsters that pierce through the oceans like it was nothing.

We grew wings.

We climbed the highest peak.

We reached the heavens and found God absent in his throne.

And the world was ours.

We own it, we are most supreme beings in existence, God is too scared to face us. We humans are the ultimate power in the universe, no gods or spirits can stop our ascension. We are the most important things ever. We are the most powerful. We rule everything! We are...

Oh... Well... shit.

So the Nihilistic horror works in design that us humans are insignificant in the face of the universe. We always pushed our fears to where our logic cannot thread.

With lovecraftian horror, our fears go to places we can't reach properly.
Antarctica, deepest oceans or islands that cannot be found.

Most of these horror stories work because our current technology cannot find these mysterious places.

It doesn't always have to be at someplace unreachable.

Or they might not be incomprehensible.

Hauntings and possessions are still popular horror themes, despite being rooted in christian origins.

So the horror theme is the column that make or break the horror story.


If you take this god:

and put him in a pokeball

then he isn't scary anymore. You just beat god.

Here is another idea, what if Matt Ward or whoever came up with this idea was pulling a "God is Dead." in the story. What if it's an atheist jack-off that says "Gods are nothing, we can control them easily.". Well then the entire story is fucked. It's pretentious and idiotic. Other horror writers who are probably not strictly religious themselves, keep the religious themes in their stories.

Completely unrelated image

Even if you are going to kill God or do some atheistic story, you would do well to think of a clever way to realise it, otherwise it comes off as if a teenager who just heard about atheism wrote the story.

Another unrelated image

Well...

Positives on New-Crons(sort of...)

So let's get into some good things about the New-Crons.

In the Old-Crons Nightbringer hunts down and kills many C'tans just to suck on their juices. This leads to few C'tans actually reaching 41st Millenium to parade as Star Gods.

Following is the new lore for the C'tans:

    The Necrons, led by the Silent King Szarekh, successfully rebelled against their C'tan Star Gods. Those C'tan who survived the revolt were broken into fragments known as C'tan Shards that were more easily contained and imprisoned within arcane Necron devices known as Tesseract Labyrinths. At present, since the Necrons' Great Awakening began in the mid-41st Millennium, these C'tan Shards are deployed when needed as the Necron Dynasties' greatest weapons on the battlefield. However, there always exists the possibility that the imprisoned C'tan will escape their captors. Then they will wreak a terrible vengeance upon their captors and the innocent alike...

So the pokeball C'tans are mere weapons, despite being powerful. This breaks the entire theme of Necrons and turn them into just another alien race that roams the galaxy.

The good thing about this is that you are free to come up with your own C'tan now.

I'm sure this rustles some jimmies in many Old-Cron fans because it's literally a bullshit excuse to make your own model.

However 40K always left some door open in the lore so you can join in with your own creations. With Chapters, Regiments, Chaos warbands, Ork tribes, Eldar Craftworld and so on. Only the necrons have no real options other than a painting scheme.
They had a lord which was just a mindless minion of the C'tan and few C'tans to choose from.

The new lore grafted in characters that you can work with and took the Necrons out from the NPC-race area.

Now Necron Overlords can have their own motivations and such. I agree that how this was made is entirely stupid. The entire slavery of C'tan and the overimportance of these characters are just another GW-model-selling-trick.

I'm positive that the writers and the marketers of GW does not give two shits when it comes to storyline as long as it sells models. So I have no misconceptions like "Why do they do this to us!".
It's a business first and a hobby tenth.

New Model Designs

Another problem with the new designed models is that the theme is moved from necrontyr tragedy to necrons the generic alien-race

 Here is the main difference in theme. The Old-Cron models were horrifying alterations of the Necron bodies. The story is that some ancient Star Gods trick you into getting into these metal bodies, then they feed on your soul and use your helpless body as a tool for their own means. This is fucking horrifying.

The New-Crons look like they're working in a minimum wage job. Do you want extra fries with that human we just cooked? I agree that min-wage jobs can be compared to being fuck-toys for Star Gods but this is fucking ridiculous. Do these guys get paid to push those control buttons? How about the retirement plans?

Imperium also does a similar thing, they strap you onto a chair and work you to death in the Munitorum. But the worker is still human and it is terrifying. Dead robots working all day is not. I don't feel one bit of sadness towards my PC doing a trillion the calculations all day. Good job idiots.

So this robots pushing buttons is not grim&dark. It's stupid.

Oh the poor robots! Oh the machinity! In the terrible dark future of 41st Millenium, there is only calculations.

Also despite the tragedy the Necrontyr went through the Necrons are designed to scare us. A guy welded onto a metalic snake body coming at you is scary. A guy sitting on a chair with a feet warmer and pushing buttons is not.

They literally built foot-pads so that these dead robots can
rest their feet on it while working endlessly.
Grim and Comfort future is horrifying.

The Necron Tragedy

Khemrization of Necrons

As we all know, GW took a huge dump on one of the most enjoyable fantasy universe out there. No I'm not talking about Dungeons, it's...

Warhammer Fantasy Battles

So now that the WH:Fantasy is out the window, Khemri is totally ripe for ripping off. The problem is once a company starts to rip off it's own franchise, things never get better.

40K was always the science-fictioned version Warhammer:Fantasy. Every race translated somehow into 40K.

Necrons weren't also original.
They were Space Vampire Counts.

They suck you off.

Both skeletal dead

The New-Crons are based on Tomb Kings.

The change isn't that much when you consider the entire lore getting fucked. If you're into WHFB then you know the themes of each races. The necrons that change from Space Vampire Counts to Space Tomb Kings is not fun. Not because of either Fantasy races but because how it is done. The entire Theme is butchered with the new necrons. The Tomb Kings fit into the Fantasy universe in their own way. They were totally different when you consider their relations to the Empire. Necrons on the other hand are one of many generic alien races out there.
In fantasy the Vampire Counts and Empire has a different relationship than they do with Tomb Kings.
There was even Vampire governors that ruled over Empire lands at some point just as same as Deceiver posing as an Imperial Governor in the Old-Cron lore.

And the Pariahs which were thrown out the window actually filled in some background lore.

They really didn't need to kick them out of the lore. Sure the model doesn't sell I understand that
much but Codexes were always filled with background lore that does not translate into the game.
We don't see Ork spores bubling up during the game do we?

The New-Crons aren't even good Khemri rip-offs. The characters are redundant, the storyline is crappy and the entire thing is poorly thought out.

I don't care! What if the model had foot-padding? Who cares! Or what if the C'tan are pokemons!
I like pokemon, I saw a picture of it once on Instagram. I like Halo and Transformers as my bestest games.

I know you don't. Nobody does. Only a small percentage of people actually give two fucks about the quality of the products they consume.

I know many people don't care about these things, so why do I actually take the time to reflect on this?
Is my life so worthless that I spent some hours writing about these stupid plastic soldiers?
Answer is yes. But there is also a point.
The theme is everything.
If you care about the feelings of what you are consuming that is. Otherwise go play Skyrim and boast how awesome on an RPG game that is. You remember Skyrim don't you? It came out a few years ago. But you probably forgotten about it already. Being the consumerist you are.

Is...Is that the one with the sword and the thing?
I forgot these things, brb need 2 tweet smthn.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

So the conclusion is this: