Editing Grimdark (section)

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* '''[[FATAL]]'''.
* [[Carl Sargent]]'s total rape of the [[Greyhawk]] setting in '''[[From The Ashes]]'''. This is a unique case in that the grimdark was actually fairly well-done; it's that he had to fuck over the game's oldest and most-beloved setting by retconning out (ex.: The Horned Society) or altering to the point of demonization (ex.: Celene, the southern duchies) anything that disagreed with the new über-grimdark direction he wanted it to take that made it grimderp.
* '''LifeWeb''': A complex SS13 spinoff taking place in a cave fortress of a neo-medieval world in the far future, combat is more lethal, and it claims to explore subjects like murder, corruption, rape(with no regard for age), torture, cultism and general human suffering. In reality, the themes it "explores" just means "it's in the game and you can do it" and it's a farce on every level possible.
* '''Warhammer 40,000''' gets called out as this by some. Certainly it's a valid criticism of certain parts, but as we said earlier, [[Skub|you could argue about what is and is not grimderp in 40k for weeks without conclusion.]] For example, the Imperium is excessively self-destructive and tyrannical to its own people, but in the hands of a good writer, it's meant to underline how corrupt and desperate the Imperium has become without the Emperor's guidance, and how even those who are neither incompetent nor malicious still have to make brutally difficult choices. In the hands of a lesser writer, it's unnecessary evil purely for the sake of evil. We should call our next book "[[C.S. Goto|Darkness of Darkest Dark!]]"
** Historically, the Grail myths drift, not from [[Ecclesiarchy|Christian sources]], but Celtic ones (and beyond the Celts, older civilizations), and a typical feature of these myths happens to be the healing of a King through forces of restauration and regeneration (i.e. to put one in touch with his sources, with his roots), and the King was typically seen in agrarian societies as the King of a land, avatara of a Sky-Father, and [[Alarielle|the Queen as the Earth Goddess]]. The [[Warhammer 40,000/Tactics/Psychic 101|Geokinesis psychic discipline]] has a power called '''Earth Blood''' who would do just that; if only [[Adeptus Custodes|someone]] let Librarians enter the Imperial Palace to do some Perceval style healing.
**[[Khornate Knights]].
**The [[Grey Knights]]' (who seem to get this a lot, really) equipment and how it is made. Specifically, every bolt shell that the Grey Knights use is consecrated by the blood sacrifice of a righteous man or woman in a borderline Khornate ritual (and it has to be a ''good'' person, not just anyone. How the Imperium determines if someone is sufficiently "good" or not remains an open question). Those Aegis armors? Made from thousands of psykers (including ''children'') burned alive in a furnace to channel their power to the armor. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people have to die to make ''one'' Grey Knight combat-effective. This has caused a lot of [[skub]] as to whether it is grimderp or not, as it raises the question of where the Grey Knights find enough good people to consecrate all of the bolter rounds they go through every battle (especially in the 42nd millennium, considering the monstrous spike in Chaos activity post-Rift).
**[[Gellar Field]]s being powered by the dreams of a comatose psyker being used as a battery (which also burns out and has to be replaced regularly). While very dark, it crosses the line into grimderp when one realizes 1) that Gellar Fields were said to be invented long before psykers began appearing among humanity, and 2) psykers are apparently rare enough in the Imperium that the Imperium has [[Black_Ships|an entire institution]] dedicated to rounding up psykers and bringing them back to Terra to make use of them, like making [[Astropath]]s or feeding the [[Astronomican]] and the [[Golden Throne]]. And according to recent editions the Black Ships are just barely meeting the quota to keep the [[Golden Throne]] going, so it's not like there are a lot of spare psykers around to be made into Gellar Field batteries.
**Originally, the [[Black Templars]] were treated as refusing to suffer the witch no matter who they were, to the point of refusing to ally with any Imperial institution that made use of them. This got retconned to only hate ''enemy'' psykers in 6th edition after it was pointed out it would be really hard for the Black Templars to do anything if they refused to tolerate Astropaths or Navigators, and thus have no Warp travel or faster-than-light communication.
**[[Imperial_Worlds#Agri-World|Agri-Worlds]]. Seemingly in response to the common fandom sentiment that [[The_Imperium_of_Man#However.2C_is_the_Imperium_really_that_bad.3F|most worlds in the Imperium are actually quite decent places to live]], just so long as you don't get invaded by [[Orks]], [[Chris Wraight]] in ''Lords of Silence'' outlines a typical Agri-World, describing a horrific hellscape wracked by permanent Dust Bowl conditions and so much pesticides that the sky turns orange and it is not safe to walk around outside without a biohazard suit, and goes on to say that all Agri-Worlds are like this. This has caused a lot of [[skub]] within the community. Some say that this practice is perfectly acceptable grimdark, and that unsustainable farming practices aren't exactly unusual in human history (look at slash-and-burn farming practices in Brazil, or aquifer use in the United States). However, what people find issue with is the claim that ''all'' agri-worlds are invariably like this, when [[Your Dudes|the fact that conditions on various planets in the Imperium vary massively from world to world as needed for the plot and there is almost no standardization]] has always been considered one of the big selling points of the setting (not to mention contradicting descriptions of Agri-Worlds in [[Ciaphas Cain]] and the [[Last Chancers]]). The other aspect that people tend to find unbelievable is that the Imperium is claimed to not even use crop rotation in their Agri-Worlds, simply farming the same crop over and over again until the soil gives out and the planet becomes a [[Death World]]. The Imperium may have lost a lot of its ancient knowledge, but crop rotation as a practice goes back to the freaking ''Stone Age''. [[Derp|Its absurd to see knowledge that basic being lost in the horrors of Old Night]], or not been rediscovered in the time after. This also means the Imperium would literally have run out of planets thousands of years ago if this was true.
** The nature of how Imperial ships work has caused a great deal of [[skub]]. Namely the fact that the weapons of Imperial ships are loaded by hundreds of chem-bulked, rabid slaves dragging them into place while being whipped, the exertion being so great that many die frothing at the mouth by the effort or have their hands crushed by chains. They do this completely by hand, hauling the munitions across the ship with chains. This despite the fact that hydraulic power systems have existed since the 18th century. They don't even use inclined planes or levers, something which humanity has been using to haul large objects where they want them to go since the days of Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Easter Island. Or they could literally just use a [[Chimera Transport|Chimera]] or a team of grox to do the job, you know, the reason why humanity built large vehicles and domesticated large animals? Meanwhile the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] is using autoloaders, and is deliberately go keeping the technology from the rest of the Imperium so they will have an advantage in case another civil war ever breaks out. Some say this is perfectly acceptable grimdark, others say that this is just too ridiculously inefficient to take seriously, even for the Imperium.
**The Marneus Calgar comic has caused a shitstorm with the recent revelations that the average life expectancy of the BEST place in the Imperium is in the mid-thirties, which is fucking <u>[[FAIL|'''STUPID''']]</U>. Because that means that the life expectancy of other non-Ultramar worlds are drastically shorter, which makes the machinations on how the Imperium is run, fucking unsustainable. If child mortality rates are ''that high'', then entire worlds would have quite literally run out of humans especially in warzones, while entire sectors' worth of economies would collapse or stagnate as more kids die before they grow up and be a productive member of society. This creates a drain in resources and long-term stability; it was already considered unsustainable during MEDIEVAL times, so you could just extrapolate this to a million worlds and the Imperium should collapse under its own inertia and weight by this point. I don't care how 'disposable' human life is, it is still a resource and the [[Emprah]] fucking hates wasting resources. We get that the comic writer is trying to shoehorn even more feudalist themes in the comics, but the problem is, this is not Krieg we're talking about, but fucking ''Ultramar''. So either the author does not know what sense of scale is, or that he does not understand the works of [[Roboute Guilliman|Guilliman]] because Grandpa Smurf [[Rage|'''WOULD. NOT.''' let this shit fly under the radar.]] The author has confirmed, however, that it was added to make Ultramar feel more grimdark. To give you some context, Somalia in the mid 1960s has a higher life expectancy than this. This is not grimdark, this is just fucking stupid that breaks the suspension of disbelief. It is one of the few things that both 4Chan and Reddit concurrently agree upon as fluff breaking.
**To be honest, the whole idea of humans being the "teeming multitudes" faction [[Imperial Guard|winning battles by sheer weight of numbers]] and which [[Skaven|breed quickly and are easily replaced]] is kind of silly if you know anything about human reproduction. Among species on Earth, humans are notable for being one of the ''slowest'' reproducing species out there. It takes nine months for a human to gestate to maturity in the womb, more than any other animal aside from elephants and whales, and even after birth humans take longer to reach maturity even compared to our close relatives the Neanderthals and ''Homo erectus''. Additionally, it takes a huge amount of parental care to care for a child and raise them to functional adulthood, more than any other animal. On top of this, pregnancy is incredibly crippling for human females, and women have a one in three chance of dying in childbirth if giving birth without any external aid or midwives (as would be the case for a citizen of the underhives), something almost no other species has to deal with. The way our species generally works is we breed incredibly slowly but live an incredibly long time and invest a lot of resources to make sure those few that are born survive to adulthood, which basically makes us the [[elves]] of the animal kingdom. Barring some major technological breakthrough like artificial wombs or genetic engineering to reduce the crippling side effects of human pregnancy or long adolescence, humans are unlikely to be able to outbreed anything. And while some factions in the Imperium do have access to artificial wombs (like the [[Mechanicus]], most of humanity in 40k are shown to still reproducing the old fashioned way. Even if humanity starts out with a huge population it can throw at any problem, that population is going to be depleted pretty fast because humanity [[Eldar|can't replace their losses]]. Even if they are the greatest resource the Imperium has, they're still trying to fight a war of attrition against foes including [[Daemons|ones who can't even be properly killed]] and two races who can easily outbreed humanity; [[Orks|one reproduces by fighting]] and [[Tyranids|the other are a rapidly reproducing horde of space locusts who go from conception to combat-ready within a Terran week]].  However, fans tend to ignore this because of the whole “to be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions” thing that is part of the general lack of regard for human life that makes 40k 40k, so people give it a pass.
** Some 40k sources claim that millions if not billions of guardsmen are killed EVERY SECOND. Even with the scale of the Imperium taken into the account, having many times the current population of the Earth die every minute would be ridiculous for the whole of Imperium, let alone just the Imperial Guard.
**[[Deathwatch|Watch Captain Artemis]] saying [[Heresy|better to let the galaxy burn and allow the Imperium to fall to Chaos than allow the xenos to live]], right before [[Battle_of_Coheria|fucking up an eldar ritual that would have awakened Ynnead early and fucked over Slaanesh]], indirectly [[Gathering Storm|causing all of the ruckus of 8th Edition]]. Granted, while this does come from the [[Deathwatch]], who tend to be rabidly anti-xenos even by the Imperium's standards, this is for ''Chaos'', the Archenemy, the [[Big Bad Evil Guy]] of the Warhammer 40k setting, the one faction that even the notoriously xenophobic Imperium will begrudgingly admit is a bigger threat than the xenos and will team up with them to fight against it. A loyalist saying they ''prefer Chaos'' over anything, even as the lesser of two evils, should be grounds for an insta-[[BLAM]]ing and a red flag for Chaos corruption. And no, Watch Captain Artemis was not [[BLAM]]-ed for this, nor is this treated as the beginnings of his corruption and a slow fall to [[Chaos]]. And so a loyalist Space Marine managed to [[Fail|single-handedly save Slaanesh]]. Seriously, Chaos champions have been elevated to [[Daemon Prince|Daemon Princehood]] for less.
** The whole thing reached the lowest point by 3rd edition, considered the Darker and Edgier version of 40k, this is when some of the silliest things mentioned in this wiki were added or accentuated, after that 40k required more than 5 EDITIONS of fluff update, novels, characters and additional background to finally come back from "we no longer care" to an actual war with stakes and actual chances for all sides involved.
** On [[Catachan]], half the population doesn't survive infancy. Of the ones that do, half don't survive past 10 years. Its not even a guarantee that people past ten years of age survive into adulthood. Between the amount of kids EACH WOMAN would be required to have just to SUSTAIN the population, the amount of care that would be required for the pregnant women and her kids, along with (at absolute best) a precarious battle against nature itself, the Catachan population would be completely unsustainable. It's an honest to God-Emperor miracle that the planet even managed to accumulate a population of 12 million people, and even more miraculous that the Space Rambos were the byproduct.
** The Emperor forcibly teleports Angron away from his final stand with his gladiator comrades, leaving them to die and telling Angron to get over himself. He also does absolutely nothing to ease Angron's suffering or convince him of the necessity of the Great Crusade. When asked by Angron why He would do something like this in spite of the wealth of other options, the only excuse Big E gives is that He's the Emperor and has more important shit to do on a much wider scale. Between there being no narrative or in-character precedent for Big E doing this and a laundry list of explanations as to what He could've done differently, this part of Angron's backstory and The Emperor's role in it can only be summed up as ADB yet again being guilty of shit writing and overly relying on daddy issues as a plot device.
** The story of the [[Brazen Drakes]] and their fall to Chaos will make you facepalm yourself with a [[Tyberos the Red Wake|Lightning Chainfist]]. During the opening of the Great Rift and the Psychic Awakening, members of the chapter began exhibiting psychic powers. Rather than legally making them Librarians, Chapter Master Corian felt the need to hide this from the Imperium to maintain their image and [[Blam|execute]] any battle brother suddenly displaying psychic abilities. Considering he was a latent psyker himself, the impulse to do this makes even less sense and is quite hypocritical. The mental strain of murdering one's own battle brothers, along with misplaced fears at how the Imperium would react to his chapter's growing psychic potential, eventually caused them to turn traitor. To sum it up, the Brazen Drakes turned traitor due to the trauma and bitterness that came with [[What|murdering their own battle brothers for something that never needed to be hidden and could be legally resolved quite easily]]. Make sense? No? Good, because it gets WORSE. Primaris Greyshield reinforcements were with a Torchbearer fleet and on their way to the Brazen Drakes homeworld. It was devastated by war, and half the chapter had fallen to Chaos. Upon seeing this, the Custodes judged the Primaris Marine reinforcements as tainted. Not once did it dawn on said Custodians that the Primaris being tainted would be completely fucking impossible due to them being created TEN MILLENNIA ago and had no relation to their chapter aside from color scheme and parent legion. They were ordered to disarm and submit to examination, but the Primaris had the bright idea of disobeying the living embodiment of the Emperor's authority (whether it was [[Skub|justified or not]], you DO NOT say no to the Custodes) and fighting them. Ironically, had the Primaris complied they likely would've been cleared later on and allowed to fight again. The resulting conflict tore apart the fleet, and engulfed 3 systems. The entire war was a colossal waste thanks to everyone responsible being fuckstupid for no reason, and was the derpiest way of proving the Primaris weren't these super duper incorruptible warriors as the fanbase had feared/speculated on.
* '''[[Drowtales]]''': The whole series is Grimderp on steroids, but there are a few particularly nauseating examples: nothing like the protagonist [[Mary Sue]] of innocence and purity blowing up the light elf MILF slave called Maya in an argument with a rival, an argument in which she feels morally justified right after buying a fighting slave which was doomed to die in underground Arenas even most Drow find disgusting, ran by a complete monster of a drow, regularly visited to watch slaves die, that's right, by the protagonist Ariel. Maya dies crying in her native tongue about "what she did to deserve this", crying she'll never see sunlight again. Protagonist feels a bit bad about a few days, and only that when she sees a few naked light elf slaves for sale, reminiscing Maya's face. Years pass and she thinks all the slavery and needless murder isn't so cool... just before visiting a surface colony who was taken from humans. She and her lesbian lover have an orgy on the settlement they just conquered by massacre. After a blissful after-sex sleep, the settlement is counterattacked by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly murdered by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a [[Mary Sue]] worshipping a total [[Baldur's Gate]] rip-off) who is all high and righteous when she is burning innocent humans who wanted to save their kin from slave traders about to buy the survivors. The protagonist's lesbian empath Drow (yes, with a length of purple hair paint, straight out of Deviantart) friend berates the cornered humans with a lame excuse line of "I feel your pain, why don't you take your survivors and run?!" when the said humans scream in desperation to save their families from the town's locked buildings, die horribly and our "I'm glad my clan Sarghress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered!" protagonist shakes hands on it. It's not even depressing, it's plain fucking logic diarrhea with enough depressive themes to OD an edgy 13 year old. (considering the authors were that old when they started...)
* Most of the anti-[[HFY]] content in the '''[[World of Darkness]]''', especially the unmitigated misanthropy in parts of [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]. Humans vary from 'Apathetic fools responsible for most of the world's ills' to 'Cackling, moustache-twirling villains', civilization and all its fruits are EVIL!, and [[Red Talons (Werewolf)|the tribe of bestiality-born werewolves that want to exterminate the human race down to pre-Stone Age levels]] are presented as heroes that're unequivocally morally justified in their actions both in and out of setting. [[FAIL|Yeah.]]
* The ''Hearts of Iron IV'' mod '''The New Order: Last Days of Europe''' has numerous dystopian "failstates", but there are a few standouts.
** The first is the SS Ordenstaat Burgund, also known as Burgundy. Covering northeastern France and Belgium, Burgundy is ruled by [[Nazi|Heinrich Himmler and the SS]] as a giant concentration camp. Its sole purpose is genocide, first on the local and ultimately on the [[Exterminatus|global]] scale. When it isn't killing its own inhabitants, it's backing SS agents throughout the Third Reich's sphere of influence to further its cause of EEEVIL. Economic minister Oswald Pohl even points out that killing massive swathes of the nation's population just for not being Aryan isn't sustainable, but Himmler regards such criticism as treason. Realistically, Burgundy should have collapsed on itself before the game started, but it can stick around regardless. Playing as it is as difficult and miserable as you'd expect from a Holocaust management sim.
*** Recent updates have focused more on the "derp" than the "grim", apparently as a reaction to Burgundy's pre-rework supervillainy. Unlike before, where it could last into the '80s [[Plot Armor|because the plot would break otherwise]], nü-Burgundy experiences [[Not As Planned]] moments on a near-[[Abbadon|FAILbaddon]] scale. Himmler [[BLAM|shooting Oswald Pohl]] for his "treason" not only tanks the economy but also makes economic management ''impossible''. Over time, the slaves, French and Belgian collaborator legions, and even Burgundy's own ministers will eventually get fed up and rebel. If Himmler purges them, ''literally everyone else'' will rise up in an event called the "Burgundian Spring". Even in the rare event that Himmler actually gets his nuclear Holocaust, it ultimately fails; the "pure" Aryans he chose to preserve emerge from their bunkers...and peacefully join post-apocalyptic society without issue. Why? Himmler told them that only true Aryans would survive the nuclear holocaust, so they assume that [[Derp|all the survivors are Aryan ''by Himmler's definition'']], [[Wat|even if said survivors are Jewish or black]].
** The next is the entirety of Russia. What-was-once Soviet Russia has collapsed into several warlord states, and many of these are grimdark as fuck. Standouts include All-Russian Black League of Omsk, a hyper-nationalist warlord state led by revenge-mad ex-Soviet generals determined to launch a no-holds-barred genocidal war against Germany called the "Great Trial" (imagine if the [[Death Korps of Krieg]] ended up in charge of Russia and you have a pretty good idea); Hyperborea, which is Russia run by [[Chaos Space Marines|batshit-insane neo-pagan Slav supremacists who practice human sacrifice]]; and the Holy Russian Empire, which... honestly deserves its own section, it's so utterly glorious in its grimdark:
*** Russia is unified by a ultra-right wing Komi government headed by a deranged, self-loathing Jewish antisemite named Sergey Taboritsky who believes that [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Tsarevich Alexei miraculously survived the massacre of the Romanovs in 1918 and, like a proverbial king under the mountain, will come back to rule once Russia is sufficiently "purified"]]. To this end, Taboritsky implements "Esoteric National Socialism" i.e the "Burgundian System" (an even more extreme ideological offshoot of Nazism emphasizing inflicting horrible state-mandated cruelty on everyone living under it to strengthen the Aryan race) in Russia, creating a [[The Imperium of Man|theocratic totalitarian dictatorship]] that purges anyone deemed sufficiently "un-Russian", with an emphasis on the Jews. To this end Taboritsky deploys [[The Purge|copious amounts of chemical weapons against dissidents, including one named "Taborite" that melts people's flesh into slurry on contact]], to the extent that vast tracts of Russia are ecologically devastated for thousands of years. Murdering the mentally-ill and disabled children, burning priests at the stake, declaring that [[Inquisition|the idea of innocence ''doesn't exist'']] and changing laws so that even dropping your tools at work can get you tried and summarily executed; that kind of shit. In a world where Adolf Hitler not only exists but achieved even more of his evil plans to reshape the world than in real life, he is considered a ''secondary evil'' to Taboritsky. But eventually Taboritsky has a beautiful vision of Alexei coming back that turns into a vision of a little pile of bones with a bullet hole through the skull, and the old man realizes that Alexei is dead and not coming back and literally ''dies of despair''. This is only the ''very beginning'' of Taboritsky's wild ride and subsequent events show the nation's descent into complete insanity that has been affectionately named "Post-Taboritsky Meta-Horror Neo-Warlordism". Because nobody in their right mind would dare confront or question a man who might strangle you thinking you are Cain, everyone settles into default orders through sheer fear. Purification squads just... keep killing, until they lose their minds ''a la'' ''Heart of Darkness''; one soldier is so far-gone that he doesn't even recognize his own parents shortly after executing them. Factory workers are made to work themselves to death because the order to let them go home never comes through. Whole towns and swathes of Russia are completely destroyed by the army bombarding them with chemical weapons or abandoned as people begin ''fleeing west into Nazi Germany'' just to escape the horror. Eventually the armies, the ministers and even the ''flag'' of the Holy Russian Empire disappear, Russia turns into a black borderless DMZ, and the portrait changes to an unlit abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere and the nation gains the "Radio Silence" trait, with only one broadcast leaving the nation's borders, presumably forevermore: ''"REMAIN CALM. THE REGENT ENDURES. ALEXEI LIVES. THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE SHALL ENDURE. THERE IS MUCH WORK TO BE DONE"''. Apparently according to the developers, what Taboritsky does to Russia is ''so thorough that it's like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust'' and the trauma is so great that Russia will ''never'' reunify ''ever again''. The sheer number of references to the Imperium of Man in Taboritsky's path is sometimes seen as a message: in literally any setting except [[Warhammer 40,000]]'s unique circumstances, a theo-fascist state comparable to the Imperium is [[FAIL|doomed to auto-genocide]]. And it only gets worse from there...
*** The ''After Midnight'' update adds a post-Taboritsky epilogue and paints a nightmarish picture of what "Post-Taboritsky Meta-Horror Neo-Warlordism" fully entails. After a period of total anarchy where mechanized warbands of radicalized ultranationalist soldiers roam the country killing everyone they encounter, successor states eventually emerge headed by some of the most deranged and unstable people you can imagine. The Black League of Omsk becomes even more insane, expanding the Great Trial, a project of genocidal war against the Germans, to also include any "corrupted" Russians not outside their borders. The once-persecuted Kazakhs are launching genocidal crusades into Russia to wipe the Russian people from the earth as revenge. A band of Shturmoviki stranded in Omsk and driven mad by the revelation that the head of the Holy Russian Empire was a Jew have [[Chaos Space Marines|pledged their allegiance to Satan out of despair and madness, engaging in human sacrifice and inviting nihilistic thugs and serial killers into their ranks]]. Magadan is a wretched hive of smugglers and ex-fascist thugs. The Eurasian Republic is a megacorp warlord state convinced that explicitly rejects all dreams and ideals beyond sustaining the state, and that Russian national identity is so tainted irrevocably by the HRE that it seeks to create a new "Eurasian" identity in its place. I could go on.