Hollis-Leick and narrative director Craig Sherman pushed back on some of the “do’s and don’ts” they received from Games Workshop about Space Marine vocabulary. They deviated from the suggested phraseology to make Titus and his comrades sound less “strange and antiquated”, less like the Spanish Inquisition, and more like soldiers from real-world present-day militaries. “Space Marines don’t necessarily say things like ‘dismissed’,” Hollis-Leick observed. “There’s a line in the game where Acheran says ‘company dismissed’ and they really wanted me to change that to ‘brothers, attend your duties’, or something. But it’s three words instead of one, and if that model was applied to all of the language in the game, I really strongly felt that people wouldn’t get it.”
Gonna be a whole lotta really peeved 40k ultra fans…
CaptSatelliteJack@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
I’ll be honest, I thought this was gonna be a thoughtless rage-bait click getter. Instead, it was a fascinating examination of what a Space Marine really is, through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. I’m glad I read that.
Letstakealook@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I agree. I only have shallow knowledge of 40k, but the exploration of the history around the universe was very fascinating. I also think it’s interesting that this issue seems to occur with satire, particularly when involving fascism. It brings to mind starship troopers and the more recent helldivers, how so many miss the point. I can’t help but feel the glorification of the military and military service in many of today’s societies lends itself to this problem. The military is inherently authoritarian, against diversity (including diversity of thought), and intentionally dehumanizes “the enemy” (turns out, it isn’t easy to kill people). Couple this with an image of masculinity that centers around adversity at best, and violence at worst along with so many men who feel they have missed opportunities to meet this standard and you have a recipe for fascists. How do we address this within our society? I don’t have the answers, but we should all be thinking about it.