Warhammer 40k Tabletop Thread XLIV - "Take a Shot of Paint Water"

[LCP]

As if absurdity counters the need for consistency?

"If you can suspend your disbelief for absurdity, why not inconsistency?"

Is that your question?

No. I wasn't really asking a question, I was making a point - but if you want me to expand that point, it's that the point of suspending disbelief is to ignore inconsistencies, not absurdity.

Absurdity is not unrealistic. It happens in the real world all the time. It can be funny, or sad, or anything in between. The way my uncle's dog sings along when you play the piano at their house is absurd. The way that a politician ends up repeating exactly the same phrase over and over in an interview because they don't want to directly answer a question is absurd. The things kids come out with every day are absurd. It doesn't mean any of them aren't real.

40K's absurdity isn't a mistake or a plot hole, it's a narrative choice - but because they've made that choice, they've included tons of stuff that is not self-consistent. In order to portray that entertaining absurdity, they've created a fictional world where everything from the physics to the logistics just doesn't stack up. I'm not even going to bother getting into examples because I think that would be an insult to your intelligence - you know how numberless the examples are.

I don't think this should be seen as a problem, because this is a story, not a simulation. Approaching a story as something where you ought to check the authors' homework for mistakes is joyless and pointless - the vast majority of stories are not intended as watertight models of an alternative reality, they are intended to communicate something. The only time that such a mistake matters is if it gets in the way of that communication by taking you out of the story.

So my point is, if you can already suspend your disbelief to the point that you don't think that a society like the Imperium should immediately collapse - where you think that like, 40K hive cities could really work, where you think that 10km-long space cathedrals ferrying people to fight ground wars with swords could really be a feasible way to control a galactic empire, where you take it for granted that tyranid hive fleets are somehow beating the 2nd law of thermodynamics - but you take issue with an inconsistency that is true of every piece of FTL fiction ever written - then you're reading the wrong book. There is hard sci-fi out there that avoids this level of inconsistency, it's generally much drier. But 40K sailed past that mark at the outset, because that level of self-consistency was never what they were trying to communicate.

It's why 40K is so full of references to other genres, other eras of history, and mythology - it's a cool, spacey, gothic coat of paint over recognisable stories, even if those stories don't actually hang together when transplanted into space in the far future. You can enjoy it for what it is, or you can pick it apart - in which case it falls into dust at the slightest touch, and I think the authors' reaction to that would be a shrug and a 'what did you expect?'. It's like going to the opera and asking why they're all being so melodramatic.

So what you're saying is that Warp travel is one of the things in 40K that's stupid if you think about it for more than four seconds.

No. I'm saying all FTL travel in any fiction creates this problem. The choices of the 40K writers in how they dressed up their version of FTL are neither here nor there. If you want to enjoy science fiction about people crossing the galaxy without taking hundreds or thousands of years to do it, then the potential time travel is an 'inconsistency' you're going to have to live with. You can go get a job in a patent office in Bern and start working on your own theory of relativity, or you can just roll with it, 'cos it's a story, and 'we don't know how this works' can be fun and interesting too.

If you time travel to the past, can you change the past? If yes, you have free will and there are no pivotal moments.
We...Agree? I think?

No, you haven't understood my point.

If I'm standing on train tracks, and I see a train coming, I have a choice to move or not. If I choose not to, the fact that I can't stop the train doesn't mean I don't have free will.

If I jump in a fast-flowing river, I can swim with the current or against it, I'll still always move in the same direction. That doesn't mean I don't have free will.

The point (which I already wrote a lot on and linked you an article for, I'm kinda disappointed you didn't even seem to try to understand it) that having free will and being historically consequential are two entirely separate things. If you believe in free will then you believe that every single person on this planet has it; I bet you don't believe that every single person on the planet is consequential. The question then arises - at enough scale, is any one person consequential, or is history ultimately driven by big, statistical forces? Did Rome really fall because of the choices of individual emperors and their enemies, or were they just the people in that place, at that time, when the climactic and social conditions were driving inevitably towards that outcome? Their choices almost definitely affected how it happened, but could they have changed that it happened? That has no bearing on whether they have free will, it just revolves around how much influence one human can ever have over the history of millions.