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Drowtales

2017-04-15T05:32:41Z

2001:56A:F107:D500:4803:CC2F:6EDA:B56C: Whoops...

{{/co/}}
{{Fail}}
{{heresy}}
{{editwar}}

[[File:Drows_in_SPEEES.jpg|thumb|In the skin darkness of the future, there is only Mary Sues. A.k.A Drowtales: How to be a mangaka-faggot with cognitive dissonance.]]
[http://www.drowtales.com Drowtales: Moonless Age] is a fantasy manga-style webcomic that has been running since 2001.

Drowtales (woo-ooo!) has had many iterations, from it's original shitty MSPaint-tier art to dozens of artists collaborating on what is now unarguably one of the best looking webcomics on the internet. Whether the story has likewise improved at all is open to debate. Drowtales is a [[skub]] topic on /tg/ that causes massive levels of autism from both it's fans and anti-fans. /tg/ has had several raids of the site's roleplaying forums, with neckbeards attempting to [[Derp|fight the drow Mary Sues with their own dwarf Mary Sues]]. The only thing most anons agree on is about the art, which, admittedly, is pretty fucking badass.

The simplest way to describe what's wrong with Drowtales can be summarized as: Take [[Drizzt]] Syndrome, infect an entire planet's worth of elves with it and replace any self-awareness moments of characters with cognitive dissonance and pump up the [[Mary Sue]]. Oh, and add in heaps of obnoxious T&A in the middle of all the wangst, and crank up the [[Grimdark]] up to eleven. So it's more [[Grimdark#Grimderp|Grimderp]] than Grimdark.

==Story==
A long time ago there were two elven nations at war. They used a magic spell to break the fucking moon apart and opened a giant portal to the netherworld so that demons flooded the surface of the planet and ate everyone.

What few elves survived this clusterfuck of a war went underground and turned into the drow. They built a giant city and then started fighting each other, preying on completely underpowered humans and slaughtering entire surface towns to drag women and children to slavery (while philosophizing about how their savior Jesus-archetype sorceress Sharess was a good goddess...)

The Empress's daughters betrayed her and locked her in her throne to starve to death while they took over the city, some people began tainting themselves with demons intentionally, the daughter of one of the clan leaders went to a magic school where she pretended to be a boy and then killed a bunch of her friends, a cult tried to summon a demon god into the underworld, and one of the Empress's daughters made a magic flower bioweapon and rode around on a magic airship with mana cannon batteries. Blah blah blah. Cue slavery, its awkward confrontation and incredibly edgy Drow butchering each other with swords, crossbows, artillery, particle rifles and mana powered mecha and submarines (I wish I made that shit up) while arguing that slavery is crucial for them to survive for its food and textile yield. (Said houses have armies of golems, submarines and mecha operated by single Drow pilots who would render manual labor obsolete anyway, but then who'd have eye candy consisting of naked light elves in chains, sitting in the marketplace...?)

tl;dr story writer occasionally shocks with completely illogical edgy points just to leave a minty Skub taste in mouth.

==Factions==
*'''Sarghress:''' The clan the main character belongs to and thus the default "heroic" or "reasonable" one. They are a clan of mercenary commoners with a musclegirl matriarch who somehow ride wolves around in the dark underworld. Yeah... In a last few chapters, they started to liberate (Drow) slaves (honestly for pragmatic purposes to stop the Sharen from using a slave army) and acting good... hopefully they'll extend the same courtesy to non-Drow in the future rather than becoming [[Eldar|status quo humping, racist and xenophobic angsty elven sluts]], so far we make do with them accepting any runaway non-Drow slave under a mercenary brigade called War Meat to fight demons, [[Tau|since non-mana bearing races seem to be]] [[Culexus|immune to demons.]]

*'''Sharen:''' The aristocrats of the city who all wear beautiful outfits and act haughty. Their clan is split into multiple bloodlines who constantly plot against each other. These are the most D&D-like drow in the setting. Also they ride dragons around and their males are mostly nether tainted automatons who wear special armor to keep them from being transformed into demonic horrors.

*'''Sullisin'rune:''' Essentially the Brave New World society in drow form. They wear a lot of blue, use empath abilities and have regular orgies in their glowing dome fortress (it's implied to be for intelligence gathering reasons). The main character's lover is from there and quips about that they treat their slaves well (Maya, the light elf slave had a real nice outfit, guiding a young Drow male and looked healthy and well-kept), so apparently being an empath works for once. Since everyone in their clan is always sensing each others emotions, they amount to a kind of quasi-benevolent police state with omniscient surveillance. One of the more interesting factions in the story.

*'''Vloz'ress:''' Anarchist demon worshipers. Like anarchists IRL, they are generally useless and self-defeating. Their leader is a figurehead woman with hair like [[Tenchi_Muyo_RPG|Washu]] and brain damage making her equal to a 4 year-old child who turns the clan's slaves and captives into eternally tortured dolls, accompanied by a reality busting, 4th wall leaning LOLRANDOM orange haired kid, because self inserts with modern 1337-5P33K adds class to a story... Right?

*'''Beldrobbaen:''' Emo goths who live in an inverted castle built on the cavern ceiling. They dress in all black and mope around. Needless to say, they are by far the most popular clan among the fanbase. Their clan is dying out because they lost a whole generation of their girls during a summoning accident, which one would think wouldn't be too bad for a race of immortal beings who can apparently reproduce for their whole lives, except that they refuse to mate with commoners and traditionally turn any male that impregnates a Beldrobbaen woman into a drider knight, so they're basically drow [[Wat|panda...mantis...things.]]

*'''Nal'sarkoth:''' Surface merchants who dress in all green. They barely show up in the story and nobody gives a flying fuck about them. They are seen running a surface trading post and treating their human workers as equals as they actively recruit non-drow races to build up their numbers.

*'''Illhar'dro:''' The other merchant clan. Slightly more interesting in that they have a form of magic based on singing (and mana powered concerts). Biggest exporter of drow pop stars in the underworld.

*'''Kyorl'solenurn:''' [[Imperium of Man|Fanatic crusader assholes]], who, aside from torturing tainted Drow to death, are the exact same [[Mary Sue]] bastards, with a twist: most are descendants of former light elf slaves, so their hatred of tainted Drow might be an outlet for their passive-aggressive grudge (the fact that their patriarchs secretly are in fact light elves may have something to do with it)... Kinda like an entire society of half-black KKK in New York trying to hunt down Ashkenazim...

*'''Jaal'darya:''' Female-only clan who use [[Tyranids|biotechnology]]. They create artificial life forms and transform their bodies into all kinds of weird shit. Regularly seen snatching babies to make bio-golems, as if the setting wasn't any more [[edgy]].

==Characters==
Way too many to list. There are dozens of them. The comic just rains characters, most of which are unimportant or are only there for background. The reason is that the characters are commissioned by donators who want to show off their horribly designed alter egos.

Basically:

* The clan matriarchs are all expert mages who would kick your shit in if you fought them, yet can't even run their houses without fucking up half of the city in an enormous conflagration by magic and demons.
* One of them is a empath who can kill opponents with a glance. One of them uses shadow tentacles to rip opponents apart. One of them is a 9 foot tall warrior woman. [http://www.drowtales.com/longestwaitarchive//20050719c1p023.JPG One of them is straight out of Dragonball Z.]
* Ariel is supposedly the main character but in the end amounts to fuck all. She goes to a magic school and then dicks around on the surface for a while, occasionally wrecking human towns and generally being a Mary Sue with a moral myopia. Before she was retconned, it was even worse: letting her light elf slave Maya be a sacrifice to Sharess (who wasn't even supposed to be a Lolth expy but a sorcerer/turned savior goddess of her people, and the world since she stopped demons from emerging) for visions. After the retcon she is still a fucking idiot with a case of Grimderp-lesbian-mana-operated mecha pilot (which is one of her hundreds of different, omnipotent skills) who accidentally killed Maya in a fit of rage when the light elf tried to maternally protect her young master, and started to feel bad about it... For a few days.
* Liriel, her perky loli slave who is retardedly optimistic of her fate and cheered as Maya's guts were blasted by a magic missile by accident, is actually the Empress whose soul fled into her personal slave to escape death... yeah, some chuunibyou-grade retarded cliche shit there. (I was the Empress in my former life!)
* Vaelia, Ariel's human gladiator bodyguard, who is so fucked beyond all saving that she needs to be explained in detail below. (Hint: one of the only non-Mary Sue, and actually flawed and scarred characters are removed from main plot and humiliated...go figure...)
* The actual main characters are supposed to be Chrys'tel and Kiel'ndia. Both of them take initiative in fighting their own evil clans and trying to save the city.
* Chrys'tel is a Sharen petulant loli drow noble who investigates her traitorous family.
* Kiel'ndia is a Vloz'ress tomboy punk demon summoner girl who breaks the 4th wall and speaks in modern English vernacular.
* Naal'suul is the best character in Drowtales. She is a totally adorable Beldrobbaen emo goth drow girl who has a giant spider that she wears as a backpack. She manages to defeat Ariel fairly easily during their fight by magically encasing her in tangible darkness, but lets her live so that she can save Ariel's mercenary slave from bleeding out on the ground. She even has a pretty noble death in the end, suiciding herself against Snadhya'rune's agents so that her friends can escape. She has the most emo appearance, powers and backstory anyone could ask for but is one of the few characters who could be considered to be purely heroic. Her taint ended up taking over her body, but she had enough willpower to retain her consciousness and personality until eventually joining Kiel's orgy of demon pals.
* There's 4-5 other characters from various clans that travel with Ariel, but they do nothing of any importance.
* The main villain of the story is Snadhya'rune. She is a purple haired Sharen summoner who wears fabulous fur coats and has smug levels that go into orbit. Though evil and cruel, at least she doesn't dick around or claim goodness or innocence. Perfect sociopath.

==So What's Wrong With It?==

The main complaint /tg/ has is that the characters are all either Mary Sues(Edgy ones at that, complete with 100% parental issues -seriously virtually all Drow are parental murderers and haters even though the series was SUPPOSED to be grey morality-), or edgier than Coldsteel the Hedgeheg even at inappropriate moments.

/tg/ doesn't mind grimdark. It doesn't mind slavery, S&M, badass Drow, porn, [[PROMOTIONS]], mutilation and torture and wars, a world after a horrible disaster or hopeless, overwhelming racism and powerful warrior races ruining everyone's day.

/tg/ minds logic and moral dissonance, PARTICULARLY Villain Sues, weeaboo faggotry trying to show [[Dark Eldar]] level slave societies which act obliviously innocently, and the plot having more holes than swiss cheese with logic failures combined with bishie sparkles that outdo [[Twilight]]... THEN authors claiming all sides have a grey morality scale when their creator's pets surpass Caligula and Darth Vader in terms of fuckwittery and grimdark. At least the bad guys of Warhammer 40000 don't try to give themselves a pass with "all morality is relative", or if they are it's only before [[Exterminatus]] comes down on them from orbit or an [[Eversor]] tears them a new one, since moral relativism and lack of mental integrity, trend of today's youth, is not a recipe for success in life, or any plot with an iota of logic.

Long story short,quoting Kern himself: In Drowtales, it's Word of God that [[Edgy|"There are no heroes or villains".]]

...

Really? Do we need to walk the amnesiac author through his very first villain who bought slaves to be mutilated and turned into monsters and forced to fight each other for fun as a side gig in her tavern, followed by the good old Sharen arch-bitch who infected entire Underworld with brainfucking fungus and tortured and executed prisoners for lulz? Ah fuck it, which of his immature-as-fuck [[Edgy]] fans would even care...

[[File:Sparklypoo.jpg|thumb|Drow politics]]

==Are They? (AKA Stuff That Drives /tg/ to Rage)==

Boy oh boy. Grimderp, fanboy masturbation and logic fails up the wazoo, until the most jaded [[Neckbeard]] will throw the table and say "fuck it" despite amazing artwork.

The series start with a illustration of how their poor race suffered a catastrophe and how "their story came to be"... right before we see a Drow war party happily slaughtering a human town and enslaving the women and children as the protagonist cheerfully tells her history of her clan and matriarch. If you aren't getting a taste of edginess masquerading the massive Mary Sue complex, read on.

It's unreal how OP the drow are in this setting compared to everything else. [[Mary Sue|Elves are the only magic-capable race in the setting, are twice the height of a regular human, power amazing technologies like power armor and antigravity ships while everyone else is medieval, do not menstruate, can regrow limbs and alter genetics with mana-magic, and are immortal while they are close to a mana source.]](putting any character of Drowtales to an online Mary Sue test yields over 90% [[Mary Sue]] rating, so yeah) Many have empathic abilities which feel every emotion (which flies in the face of their slaver-murderer-cannibal tradition. But fuck that, I'ma get my slaves and be a lesbian elf, and do whatever I want and get fan sympathy.) The sentient beings taken by them become immediately docile and obedient to the point that they can openly gloat about eating their own kind to its face without as much as a spot of anger on the victim (yes, meat is a delicacy and in famines slaves (especially humans) are regularly slaughtered for food and there are many Drow client races of furries, and dragons, so there is a good chance some of the sponsors or artists are furry/guro/dolcett/vorefags, the lowest kind of online creatures). Some have cat ears. All are bisexual. The main character pulls out any imaginable power out of her ass when cornered. There's faggotry like the drow getting high on chocolate (seriously). The drow are shown to be mostly cute, animesque and angsty nerdy teenagers who bitch to each other about their lives, before having an orgy on the settlement they just conquered from humans, which we will explain later.

As another point, let's look at the slavery. The author wants slaves in the setting for NSFW and a little darkness. Then we are constantly reminded how food is scarce, slaves and even dead drow are often butchered and eaten, and in the event of a demon outbreak, all mana-using slaves are killed, which they cry and moan but meekly kneel to be beheaded. In another issue, a coup yields a few prisoners to be questioned, who say that "food is expensive, slaves are cheap" and admit they used slaves for meat for other slaves. (reminder that Drowtales fanbase has a good grasp on cannibal/vore fetish)

The setting's Drow slave system flies in the face of any logic as slaves (most non-Drow, but some Drow POW's as well) cost food to upkeep, and so, slave societies inherently need a workable potential of agriculture and lack of master population to be widely viable. Cue entire Drow cities full of regular urban Drow population that live in slums and work for pennies and sell their babies to Jaal'darya to be made into freaks. Remind me why they needed the potentially dangerous, uprising-prone foreign population as slaves down there? Those that can accidentally summon daemons because they are mana bearing light elves with no focus, training and traumatized by slavery?If one wants to put fantasy reasons for keeping light elves as slaves, D&D Drow kill them on sight, and this setting has no reason or religious motivation even to attack them. As a final touch, slaves have hair cut short, and if freed, invest in hair lengthening as a cheap shout-out to potential childhood fights of the authors with parents about hair length. Classy.

Shit isn't even Grimdark, it defies any common sense for cheap shock factor.

Speaking of other races:

Their cousins, surface elves have a prudish, pacifist and non-slaving sex-segregated caste system, while the Drow are your typical bisexual, sex-rich, matriarchal BDSM empire which has slaves by the ton to eat/rape/kill with no moral compunctions, and the surface elves are pictured as the morally bad and boring side. The irony is lost on the writers... then maybe not, considering Drowtales goes pretty much as a hatefic against humans, especially heterosexual and morally consistent vanilla people. (Read: Socially functioning normie). The sheer number of lesbian sex can be explained as the series' are sponsored by virgin otaku faggots and edgy Deviantart girls (read: male in real life) who would blow their gaskets at touching a girl and seizing her hands and confidently confess love. Most sex and porn usually is lesbian, which brings an even funnier point to Drowtales since the ridiculous numbers of deaths need children and reproduction somewhere.

The humans, orcs and other "goblins"? Their failure to manipulate mana makes them soulless and on par with animals in Drow eyes. Regularly enslaved, massacred and eaten even by the "good" characters. And humans are composed of two sub-species, Hermione and Emberi: Hermiones are hairy, white people with a distinct Nordic/Saxon culture, whereas Emberi are Japanese. Hermiones are pictured as coming beyond the seas, threatening our little innocent Drow colonies with a series of Holy Wars and calling them black devils (because it's a no-no to fight against a murderous, cannibalistic empire when they are Creator's Pets), and Emberi are naturally subservient, sexist towards their women, worshipful of Drow and beastly docile to the point of doglike obedience, gladly enduring any abuse, suggesting our "artists" took a nice gander at [[FATAL]] and regurgitated it.

Compared to these fucks, the drow are so OP that [[Mary Sue|a couple of children who are competent magic users break through and rout an entire human city with walled fortifications and a brigade of heavily armed adult human guards, kill the king and his entire court]], and take the light elven prisoners to an elven village, knowing the light elves will be enslaved underground, because they feel like being moral for once before buying another light elf slave at their underground city to cook for them.

Our characters visit a surface colony (i.e a human village massacred and taken over). Typical of Drow, orgy ensues. Enjoying a blissful after-sex sleep with her lesbian empath girlfriend, they are woken up to a counterattack by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly defeated by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a typical mixed-blood [[Mary Sue]] worshiping a Goddess who is a total Baldur's Gate rip-off) who is all high and righteous when she is burning alive a bunch of humans who are fighting to save their kin from slave traders who'd 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 so, we have our heroes going "I'm glad my clan Sarghress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered from humans whom we will sell later!" shake hands with the colony Drow. Mind you, they had talked about doing great things and ensuring peace in the world a couple of issues before and posing all heroically.

The retarded abortion of a plot brings us to Vaelia, a human gladiator slave woman whose village was destroyed (because she told the Drow their location in a fit of anger when [[-4 Str|they didn't want women in the guard]]) and survivors were put to chains and sold to Drow cities. She was put to an arena to fight to death until Ariel wanted a bodyguard and bought her to take home(on a brighter note, deathmatches for slaves was something a good number of Drow were disturbed as well, and Ariel's clan already planned on destroying the place, freeing the slaves, [[Awesome|tossing the owner to the pit against a dragon]] and shutting it down in a rare Pet the Dog moment, which they did). On the road, Ariel was being strangled by some asshole Drow, [[Awesome|upon which Vaelia kickboxed the Drow to a stalemate with her hands chained]] [[Grimdark|until she was stabbed and kicked aside]], only saved by a guardswoman that didn't fall for this shit. Ariel has her healed and sets her free which amounts to fuck-all since Vaelia is now homeless, her clan sold everywhere and alone below miles of rock, so she stays with our Skub loli Drow for some time. Her behavior and success makes Ariel wonder that humans may have feelings and stories worth preserving, so just when we see the trigger of a change in the Drow society, she suddenly goes to the surface and leaves her circle of friends and only patroness who could get shit done... to work with Drow raiders who hunt for mana bearing artifacts because she somehow wants to see the sun. Treated like a dog, beaten and left for starvation in a locked magic hut because she prevented Drow to crush fairies to death for fun, our masochistic moron keeps following her new "mercenary" company and even begs them to spare a human village, persuading the humans to give away their harvested amber. Her "captain" remarks how races could get along with a little effort with a happy drawing ([[Derp|By robbing the villagers and sparing their lives, who'd give away their worthless amber anyway had anyone asked.]]) One needs real brain damage to even see any broken Aesop. 15 years later she is seen, having fucked like rabbits and popped three human children, helping the more peaceful, less racist Drow overthrow Sharen slavers, STILL treated worse than a dog by her captain, only mildly appreciated by a Drow woman who was interested in human language and culture whom she saved later. Of course, in typical Drowtales fashion, the kids' fathers are irrelevant and unknown because father figures are an anathema to degenerate faggots who finance the stories. She could have been an amazing catalyst, perhaps a human [[World of Warcraft|Thrall]] for a cross-racial epic motive change, only to be used as a MILF musclegirl punching bag, mentally subjugated, put on a bus and fuck off to some obscure trading post because donators want MORE DROW AND ONLY DROW...[[Rage|FFFFFFFFFFF-]]

At first you think that it is like an examination of the conflicts that arise from putting a bunch of Mary Sues in a cavern that is too small for them, but then you realize that it is about a bunch of Mary Sues with a developer possessing a plot memory and integrity of a goldfish.

Arguments with its fans about the plot dissonance reveal that they simply hand-wave any argument with the words that "they are a species with different morals" or "they are morally justified to do so and if you disagree you aren't hardcore enough with your pink glass morality or understand my gothic ART". So typical, Nietzsche-on-crack ,"I'm so different than mankind and gothic and purple haired faggot and I reject your HUUMAN morals of good and evil wankity wank wank daddy love meeee" going on there.

Apparently in Drowtales' setting ([http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?sid=6094 In a retarded troll logic]), Drow honor is based on the scale of a deed, not the justice of it (so basically it's moral to annihilate the surface and enslave everyone until somehow you feel bad, and immoral to fail, destroying the fucking moon because you failed). However, this is contradicted by all the times where drow have normal, quite human morals (that they randomly choose to ignore, taking us back to step one, namely [[Skub|cognitive dissonance]] since writers without emotional maturity and experience are not the best prospect for authoring an artifical moral code, much less parade it as art).

Of course, the canon being the result of edgy roleplay sponsors to the series, immature bondage-curious kids might have a hand at continuously smashing any drift in the Drow culture towards understanding and goodwill towards other races even when there is no motivation to continue being an asshole in a world in which Drow need a mana pool and cannot separate from communities for a long time, and there is no Lolth to worship, no mega-horror grade entities in the Underworld to militarize against (except themselves, below the earth is relatively benign, no Illithids, Beholders or Kuo-Toa), and the humans they continously enslaved and raped are so furious at their atrocities that they send entire armies forming huge, militarized kingdoms across the ocean and are willing to fight while armed with nothing but swords and the [[Imperial Guard|sheer fucking balls to jump into melee against beings who tower over them while wearing magically-crafted super metal armor and being able to control the elements and shoot mana energy bolts at will.]] No, we'll just whip up some magitech superpower and our Drow characters will reign supreme... So that we can fund our CYOA bondage porn at ehentai.com where we act with the "spoils of war" in the slave market.

How do we know this foregone conclusion? The Drow completely dominating the surface and driving the "animalistic" humans to reservations? Enter the Daydream, the epitome of faggotry since Folsom Street Fairs, explained below.

The amazing level of immature Villain Sue faggotry rises to new heights in a "Space Age" story arc about 10000 years later when Drow apparently are the sole rulers of their world and [[Wat|explore the space with mana powered spaceships and Earth of all places]]. In this arc Drow are somehow good people after millenia of slavery and genocide and help Earth humans with some civil war; only after they are beaten the crap out of when mistaking a powered-down human spacecraft for a derelict.

The humans in their own planet?

[http://www.drowtales.com/~daydream/liriel.php?sid=4102 Herded to mud hut reservations next to high tech Mary Sue cities because the artists hate humanity with such vitriol that they have to kick the dog, which they cannot do in real life.] Dorfs? Very likely extinct, along with orcs. Because it feels good to waste an amazing opportunity where humans and other non-Mana using races could be integrated as subjects amongst the Drow empire in modern times and could have their little stories of culture shock. Instead we'll just make magitek make-believe spaceships with god-tier AI's and sexy pink-purple realities in them for Drow to constantly fuck during spaceflights rather than training or even reading something which is needed for any decent modern vocation, because HOLY SHIT OHMIGOD I CAN'T GET ENOUGH FANWANK HERE. There is a cruel cosmic joke here when a webcomic with one of the worst plots in existence gets the best update rate and artists...

Skub being skub, this often boils over to related articles and websites. One example is Tv Tropes, where each and every trope pointing out the plot problems gets mercilessly deleted by sockpuppets. Or this article itself, which has been tagged with EDITWAR, because even elegan/tg/entlemen can find something to skub about, even if it's over the amount and consistency of the skub. YMMV.

[[Rage|tl;dr Space Opera, edgier and skubbier than Warhammer 40000]]

==Some Things That Don't Suck About It==

Now to render unto Caesar...

As stated, the art is outrageously above and beyond the usual webcomic fare. It really can't be stressed enough how beautiful some of the pages can get, though when other webcomics are mostly teenagers on DeviantART and you employ the best artists with porn sponsor money, that's to be expected.

The drow themselves, while ridiculously OP, are actually given some variation and complexity bordering on outright dissent from traditional oppressive values (surface traders who chill with other races and aren't dicks, Drow paladins (though the sheer dissonant and illogical design leaves much to be desired- burning humans who want to save their kin with holy fire, channeling a "good goddess" who accepts innocent sacrifices is... [[Derp|controversial at best]]) empaths, who actually treat their slaves quite well, wilderness Drow '''rednecks''' even) as a society with all of the different clans and factions. Vastly more so than the D&D drow, whose society is a forced [[Stupid Evil]] amalgam of city-states, civil wars and Grimdark theocracy of sacrifice and mass-murder.

The artist also deserves some praise for actually keeping this thing going since 2001. With 50 chapters and over 2500 pages not including the spin-offs, it is one of the longest webcomics ever and runs at an insane ''daily update rate''. The man works at a pace that makes [[Servitors]] look lazy. If only we could give some of his energy to [[A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire|GRRM]]... But then, they have a certain motivation called money, and NOT one artist...who actually employs lots of artists by the fuckton from the donations for retarded self-inserts and lines. The entire premise runs on the said faggots paying the developer for said self-inserts (when humans try to liberate their imprisoned kin, an out-of-place drow character uses a female high heel shoe to kill the desperate (and justified) attackers while shouting a cheesy retarded line...) and plot lines they want themselves, so the sheer commercial motivation should be a reason this series goes on.

==See Also==

*[[Goblins]]: A sort of inversion on Drowtales where instead of the main race being blatantly OP, the main race is constantly bullied by everyone else to show how sad they are.
*[[Edgy]]: Trying far too hard to pump up sad and/or shocking concepts in a story to the point that it grates on the most jaded nerves, usually done by immature "artists".

[[category: Webcomics]]
[[category: Skub]]

Drowtales

2017-04-15T05:31:48Z

2001:56A:F107:D500:4803:CC2F:6EDA:B56C: Truce?

{{/co/}}
{{Fail}}
{{heresy}}
{{editwar}}

[[File:Drows_in_SPEEES.jpg|thumb|In the skin darkness of the future, there is only Mary Sues. A.k.A Drowtales: How to be a mangaka-faggot with cognitive dissonance.]]
[http://www.drowtales.com Drowtales: Moonless Age] is a fantasy manga-style webcomic that has been running since 2001.

Drowtales (woo-ooo!) has had many iterations, from it's original shitty MSPaint-tier art to dozens of artists collaborating on what is now unarguably one of the best looking webcomics on the internet. Whether the story has likewise improved at all is open to debate. Drowtales is a [[skub]] topic on /tg/ that causes massive levels of autism from both it's fans and anti-fans. /tg/ has had several raids of the site's roleplaying forums, with neckbeards attempting to [[Derp|fight the drow Mary Sues with their own dwarf Mary Sues]]. The only thing most anons agree on is about the art, which, admittedly, is pretty fucking badass.

The simplest way to describe what's wrong with Drowtales can be summarized as: Take [[Drizzt]] Syndrome, infect an entire planet's worth of elves with it and replace any self-awareness moments of characters with cognitive dissonance and pump up the [[Mary Sue]]. Oh, and add in heaps of obnoxious T&A in the middle of all the wangst, and crank up the [[Grimdark]] up to eleven. So it's more [[Grimdark#Grimderp|Grimderp]] than Grimdark.

==Story==
A long time ago there were two elven nations at war. They used a magic spell to break the fucking moon apart and opened a giant portal to the netherworld so that demons flooded the surface of the planet and ate everyone.

What few elves survived this clusterfuck of a war went underground and turned into the drow. They built a giant city and then started fighting each other, preying on completely underpowered humans and slaughtering entire surface towns to drag women and children to slavery (while philosophizing about how their savior Jesus-archetype sorceress Sharess was a good goddess...)

The Empress's daughters betrayed her and locked her in her throne to starve to death while they took over the city, some people began tainting themselves with demons intentionally, the daughter of one of the clan leaders went to a magic school where she pretended to be a boy and then killed a bunch of her friends, a cult tried to summon a demon god into the underworld, and one of the Empress's daughters made a magic flower bioweapon and rode around on a magic airship with mana cannon batteries. Blah blah blah. Cue slavery, its awkward confrontation and incredibly edgy Drow butchering each other with swords, crossbows, artillery, particle rifles and mana powered mecha and submarines (I wish I made that shit up) while arguing that slavery is crucial for them to survive for its food and textile yield. (Said houses have armies of golems, submarines and mecha operated by single Drow pilots who would render manual labor obsolete anyway, but then who'd have eye candy consisting of naked light elves in chains, sitting in the marketplace...?)

tl;dr story writer occasionally shocks with completely illogical edgy points just to leave a minty Skub taste in mouth.

==Factions==
*'''Sarghress:''' The clan the main character belongs to and thus the default "heroic" or "reasonable" one. They are a clan of mercenary commoners with a musclegirl matriarch who somehow ride wolves around in the dark underworld. Yeah... In a last few chapters, they started to liberate (Drow) slaves (honestly for pragmatic purposes to stop the Sharen from using a slave army) and acting good... hopefully they'll extend the same courtesy to non-Drow in the future rather than becoming [[Eldar|status quo humping, racist and xenophobic angsty elven sluts]], so far we make do with them accepting any runaway non-Drow slave under a mercenary brigade called War Meat to fight demons, [[Tau|since non-mana bearing races seem to be]] [[Culexus|immune to demons.]]

*'''Sharen:''' The aristocrats of the city who all wear beautiful outfits and act haughty. Their clan is split into multiple bloodlines who constantly plot against each other. These are the most D&D-like drow in the setting. Also they ride dragons around and their males are mostly nether tainted automatons who wear special armor to keep them from being transformed into demonic horrors.

*'''Sullisin'rune:''' Essentially the Brave New World society in drow form. They wear a lot of blue, use empath abilities and have regular orgies in their glowing dome fortress (it's implied to be for intelligence gathering reasons). The main character's lover is from there and quips about that they treat their slaves well (Maya, the light elf slave had a real nice outfit, guiding a young Drow male and looked healthy and well-kept), so apparently being an empath works for once. Since everyone in their clan is always sensing each others emotions, they amount to a kind of quasi-benevolent police state with omniscient surveillance. One of the more interesting factions in the story.

*'''Vloz'ress:''' Anarchist demon worshipers. Like anarchists IRL, they are generally useless and self-defeating. Their leader is a figurehead woman with hair like [[Tenchi_Muyo_RPG|Washu]] and brain damage making her equal to a 4 year-old child who turns the clan's slaves and captives into eternally tortured dolls, accompanied by a reality busting, 4th wall leaning LOLRANDOM orange haired kid, because self inserts with modern 1337-5P33K adds class to a story... Right?

*'''Beldrobbaen:''' Emo goths who live in an inverted castle built on the cavern ceiling. They dress in all black and mope around. Needless to say, they are by far the most popular clan among the fanbase. Their clan is dying out because they lost a whole generation of their girls during a summoning accident, which one would think wouldn't be too bad for a race of immortal beings who can apparently reproduce for their whole lives, except that they refuse to mate with commoners and traditionally turn any male that impregnates a Beldrobbaen woman into a drider knight, so they're basically drow [[Wat|panda...mantis...things.]]

*'''Nal'sarkoth:''' Surface merchants who dress in all green. They barely show up in the story and nobody gives a flying fuck about them. They are seen running a surface trading post and treating their human workers as equals as they actively recruit non-drow races to build up their numbers.

*'''Illhar'dro:''' The other merchant clan. Slightly more interesting in that they have a form of magic based on singing (and mana powered concerts). Biggest exporter of drow pop stars in the underworld.

*'''Kyorl'solenurn:''' [[Imperium of Man|Fanatic crusader assholes]], who, aside from torturing tainted Drow to death, are the exact same [[Mary Sue]] bastards, with a twist: most are descendants of former light elf slaves, so their hatred of tainted Drow might be an outlet for their passive-aggressive grudge (the fact that their patriarchs secretly are in fact light elves may have something to do with it)... Kinda like an entire society of half-black KKK in New York trying to hunt down Ashkenazim...

*'''Jaal'darya:''' Female-only clan who use [[Tyranids|biotechnology]]. They create artificial life forms and transform their bodies into all kinds of weird shit. Regularly seen snatching babies to make bio-golems, as if the setting wasn't any more [[edgy]].

==Characters==
Way too many to list. There are dozens of them. The comic just rains characters, most of which are unimportant or are only there for background. The reason is that the characters are commissioned by donators who want to show off their horribly designed alter egos.

Basically:

* The clan matriarchs are all expert mages who would kick your shit in if you fought them, yet can't even run their houses without fucking up half of the city in an enormous conflagration by magic and demons.
* One of them is a empath who can kill opponents with a glance. One of them uses shadow tentacles to rip opponents apart. One of them is a 9 foot tall warrior woman. [http://www.drowtales.com/longestwaitarchive//20050719c1p023.JPG One of them is straight out of Dragonball Z.]
* Ariel is supposedly the main character but in the end amounts to fuck all. She goes to a magic school and then dicks around on the surface for a while, occasionally wrecking human towns and generally being a Mary Sue with a moral myopia. Before she was retconned, it was even worse: letting her light elf slave Maya be a sacrifice to Sharess (who wasn't even supposed to be a Lolth expy but a sorcerer/turned savior goddess of her people, and the world since she stopped demons from emerging) for visions. After the retcon she is still a fucking idiot with a case of Grimderp-lesbian-mana-operated mecha pilot (which is one of her hundreds of different, omnipotent skills) who accidentally killed Maya in a fit of rage when the light elf tried to maternally protect her young master, and started to feel bad about it... For a few days.
* Liriel, her perky loli slave who is retardedly optimistic of her fate and cheered as Maya's guts were blasted by a magic missile by accident, is actually the Empress whose soul fled into her personal slave to escape death... yeah, some chuunibyou-grade retarded cliche shit there. (I was the Empress in my former life!)
* Vaelia, Ariel's human gladiator bodyguard, who is so fucked beyond all saving that she needs to be explained in detail below. (Hint: one of the only non-Mary Sue, and actually flawed and scarred characters are removed from main plot and humiliated...go figure...)
* The actual main characters are supposed to be Chrys'tel and Kiel'ndia. Both of them take initiative in fighting their own evil clans and trying to save the city.
* Chrys'tel is a Sharen petulant loli drow noble who investigates her traitorous family.
* Kiel'ndia is a Vloz'ress tomboy punk demon summoner girl who breaks the 4th wall and speaks in modern English vernacular.
* Naal'suul is the best character in Drowtales. She is a totally adorable Beldrobbaen emo goth drow girl who has a giant spider that she wears as a backpack. She manages to defeat Ariel fairly easily during their fight by magically encasing her in tangible darkness, but lets her live so that she can save Ariel's mercenary slave from bleeding out on the ground. She even has a pretty noble death in the end, suiciding herself against Snadhya'rune's agents so that her friends can escape. She has the most emo appearance, powers and backstory anyone could ask for but is one of the few characters who could be considered to be purely heroic. Her taint ended up taking over her body, but she had enough willpower to retain her consciousness and personality until eventually joining Kiel's orgy of demon pals.
* There's 4-5 other characters from various clans that travel with Ariel, but they do nothing of any importance.
* The main villain of the story is Snadhya'rune. She is a purple haired Sharen summoner who wears fabulous fur coats and has smug levels that go into orbit. Though evil and cruel, at least she doesn't dick around or claim goodness or innocence. Perfect sociopath.

==So What's Wrong With It?==

The main complaint /tg/ has is that the characters are all either Mary Sues(Edgy ones at that, complete with 100% parental issues -seriously virtually all Drow are parental murderers and haters even though the series was SUPPOSED to be grey morality-), or edgier than Coldsteel the Hedgeheg even at inappropriate moments.

/tg/ doesn't mind grimdark. It doesn't mind slavery, S&M, badass Drow, porn, [[PROMOTIONS]], mutilation and torture and wars, a world after a horrible disaster or hopeless, overwhelming racism and powerful warrior races ruining everyone's day.

/tg/ minds logic and moral dissonance, PARTICULARLY Villain Sues, weeaboo faggotry trying to show [[Dark Eldar]] level slave societies which act obliviously innocently, and the plot having more holes than swiss cheese with logic failures combined with bishie sparkles that outdo [[Twilight]]... THEN authors claiming all sides have a grey morality scale when their creator's pets surpass Caligula and Darth Vader in terms of fuckwittery and grimdark. At least the bad guys of Warhammer 40000 don't try to give themselves a pass with "all morality is relative", or if they are it's only before [[Exterminatus]] comes down on them from orbit or an [[Eversor]] tears them a new one, since moral relativism and lack of mental integrity, trend of today's youth, is not a recipe for success in life, or any plot with an iota of logic.

Long story short,quoting Kern himself: In Drowtales, it's Word of God that [[Edgy|"There are no heroes or villains".]]

...

Really? Do we need to walk the amnesiac author through his very first villain who bought slaves to be mutilated and turned into monsters and forced to fight each other for fun as a side gig in her tavern, followed by the good old Sharen arch-bitch who infected entire Underworld with brainfucking fungus and tortured and executed prisoners for lulz? Ah fuck it, which of his immature-as-fuck [[Edgy]] fans would even care...

[[File:Sparklypoo.jpg|thumb|Drow politics]]

==Are They? (AKA Stuff That Drives /tg/ to Rage)==

Boy oh boy. Grimderp, fanboy masturbation and logic fails up the wazoo, until the most jaded [[Neckbeard]] will throw the table and say "fuck it" despite amazing artwork.

The series start with a illustration of how their poor race suffered a catastrophe and how "their story came to be"... right before we see a Drow war party happily slaughtering a human town and enslaving the women and children as the protagonist cheerfully tells her history of her clan and matriarch. If you aren't getting a taste of edginess masquerading the massive Mary Sue complex, read on.

It's unreal how OP the drow are in this setting compared to everything else. [[Mary Sue|Elves are the only magic-capable race in the setting, are twice the height of a regular human, power amazing technologies like power armor and antigravity ships while everyone else is medieval, do not menstruate, can regrow limbs and alter genetics with mana-magic, and are immortal while they are close to a mana source.]](putting any character of Drowtales to an online Mary Sue test yields over 90% [[Mary Sue]] rating, so yeah) Many have empathic abilities which feel every emotion (which flies in the face of their slaver-murderer-cannibal tradition. But fuck that, I'ma get my slaves and be a lesbian elf, and do whatever I want and get fan sympathy.) The sentient beings taken by them become immediately docile and obedient to the point that they can openly gloat about eating their own kind to its face without as much as a spot of anger on the victim (yes, meat is a delicacy and in famines slaves (especially humans) are regularly slaughtered for food and there are many Drow client races of furries, and dragons, so there is a good chance some of the sponsors or artists are furry/guro/dolcett/vorefags, the lowest kind of online creatures). Some have cat ears. All are bisexual. The main character pulls out any imaginable power out of her ass when cornered. There's faggotry like the drow getting high on chocolate (seriously). The drow are shown to be mostly cute, animesque and angsty nerdy teenagers who bitch to each other about their lives, before having an orgy on the settlement they just conquered from humans, which we will explain later.

As another point, let's look at the slavery. The author wants slaves in the setting for NSFW and a little darkness. Then we are constantly reminded how food is scarce, slaves and even dead drow are often butchered and eaten, and in the event of a demon outbreak, all mana-using slaves are killed, which they cry and moan but meekly kneel to be beheaded. In another issue, a coup yields a few prisoners to be questioned, who say that "food is expensive, slaves are cheap" and admit they used slaves for meat for other slaves. (reminder that Drowtales fanbase has a good grasp on cannibal/vore fetish)

The setting's Drow slave system flies in the face of any logic as slaves (most non-Drow, but some Drow POW's as well) cost food to upkeep, and so, slave societies inherently need a workable potential of agriculture and lack of master population to be widely viable. Cue entire Drow cities full of regular urban Drow population that live in slums and work for pennies and sell their babies to Jaal'darya to be made into freaks. Remind me why they needed the potentially dangerous, uprising-prone foreign population as slaves down there? Those that can accidentally summon daemons because they are mana bearing light elves with no focus, training and traumatized by slavery?If one wants to put fantasy reasons for keeping light elves as slaves, D&D Drow kill them on sight, and this setting has no reason or religious motivation even to attack them. As a final touch, slaves have hair cut short, and if freed, invest in hair lengthening as a cheap shout-out to potential childhood fights of the authors with parents about hair length. Classy.

Shit isn't even Grimdark, it defies any common sense for cheap shock factor.

Speaking of other races:

Their cousins, surface elves have a prudish, pacifist and non-slaving sex-segregated caste system, while the Drow are your typical bisexual, sex-rich, matriarchal BDSM empire which has slaves by the ton to eat/rape/kill with no moral compunctions, and the surface elves are pictured as the morally bad and boring side. The irony is lost on the writers... then maybe not, considering Drowtales goes pretty much as a hatefic against humans, especially heterosexual and morally consistent vanilla people. (Read: Socially functioning normie). The sheer number of lesbian sex can be explained as the series' are sponsored by virgin otaku faggots and edgy Deviantart girls (read: male in real life) who would blow their gaskets at touching a girl and seizing her hands and confidently confess love. Most sex and porn usually is lesbian, which brings an even funnier point to Drowtales since the ridiculous numbers of deaths need children and reproduction somewhere.

The humans, orcs and other "goblins"? Their failure to manipulate mana makes them soulless and on par with animals in Drow eyes. Regularly enslaved, massacred and eaten even by the "good" characters. And humans are composed of two sub-species, Hermione and Emberi: Hermiones are hairy, white people with a distinct Nordic/Saxon culture, whereas Emberi are Japanese. Hermiones are pictured as coming beyond the seas, threatening our little innocent Drow colonies with a series of Holy Wars and calling them black devils (because it's a no-no to fight against a murderous, cannibalistic empire when they are Creator's Pets), and Emberi are naturally subservient, sexist towards their women, worshipful of Drow and beastly docile to the point of doglike obedience, gladly enduring any abuse, suggesting our "artists" took a nice gander at [[FATAL]] and regurgitated it.

Compared to these fucks, the drow are so OP that [[Mary Sue|a couple of children who are competent magic users break through and rout an entire human city with walled fortifications and a brigade of heavily armed adult human guards, kill the king and his entire court]], and take the light elven prisoners to an elven village, knowing the light elves will be enslaved underground, because they feel like being moral for once before buying another light elf slave at their underground city to cook for them.

Our characters visit a surface colony (i.e a human village massacred and taken over). Typical of Drow, orgy ensues. Enjoying a blissful after-sex sleep with her lesbian empath girlfriend, they are woken up to a counterattack by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly defeated by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a typical mixed-blood [[Mary Sue]] worshiping a Goddess who is a total Baldur's Gate rip-off) who is all high and righteous when she is burning alive a bunch of humans who are fighting to save their kin from slave traders who'd 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 so, we have our heroes going "I'm glad my clan Sarghress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered from humans whom we will sell later!" shake hands with the colony Drow. Mind you, they had talked about doing great things and ensuring peace in the world a couple of issues before and posing all heroically.

The retarded abortion of a plot brings us to Vaelia, a human gladiator slave woman whose village was destroyed (because she told the Drow their location in a fit of anger when [[-4 Str|they didn't want women in the guard]]) and survivors were put to chains and sold to Drow cities. She was put to an arena to fight to death until Ariel wanted a bodyguard and bought her to take home(on a brighter note, deathmatches for slaves was something a good number of Drow were disturbed as well, and Ariel's clan already planned on destroying the place, freeing the slaves, [[Awesome|tossing the owner to the pit against a dragon]] and shutting it down in a rare Pet the Dog moment, which they did). On the road, Ariel was being strangled by some asshole Drow, [[Awesome|upon which Vaelia kickboxed the Drow to a stalemate with her hands chained]] [[Grimdark|until she was stabbed and kicked aside]], only saved by a guardswoman that didn't fall for this shit. Ariel has her healed and sets her free which amounts to fuck-all since Vaelia is now homeless, her clan sold everywhere and alone below miles of rock, so she stays with our Skub loli Drow for some time. Her behavior and success makes Ariel wonder that humans may have feelings and stories worth preserving, so just when we see the trigger of a change in the Drow society, she suddenly goes to the surface and leaves her circle of friends and only patroness who could get shit done... to work with Drow raiders who hunt for mana bearing artifacts because she somehow wants to see the sun. Treated like a dog, beaten and left for starvation in a locked magic hut because she prevented Drow to crush fairies to death for fun, our masochistic moron keeps following her new "mercenary" company and even begs them to spare a human village, persuading the humans to give away their harvested amber. Her "captain" remarks how races could get along with a little effort with a happy drawing ([[Derp|By robbing the villagers and sparing their lives, who'd give away their worthless amber anyway had anyone asked.]]) One needs real brain damage to even see any broken Aesop. 15 years later she is seen, having fucked like rabbits and popped three human children, helping the more peaceful, less racist Drow overthrow Sharen slavers, STILL treated worse than a dog by her captain, only mildly appreciated by a Drow woman who was interested in human language and culture whom she saved later. Of course, in typical Drowtales fashion, the kids' fathers are irrelevant and unknown because father figures are an anathema to degenerate faggots who finance the stories. She could have been an amazing catalyst, perhaps a human [[World of Warcraft|Thrall]] for a cross-racial epic motive change, only to be used as a MILF musclegirl punching bag, mentally subjugated, put on a bus and fuck off to some obscure trading post because donators want MORE DROW AND ONLY DROW...[[Rage|FFFFFFFFFFF-]]

At first you think that it is like an examination of the conflicts that arise from putting a bunch of Mary Sues in a cavern that is too small for them, but then you realize that it is about a bunch of Mary Sues with a developer possessing a plot memory and integrity of a goldfish.

Arguments with its fans about the plot dissonance reveal that they simply hand-wave any argument with the words that "they are a species with different morals" or "they are morally justified to do so and if you disagree you aren't hardcore enough with your pink glass morality or understand my gothic ART". So typical, Nietzsche-on-crack ,"I'm so different than mankind and gothic and purple haired faggot and I reject your HUUMAN morals of good and evil wankity wank wank daddy love meeee" going on there.

Apparently in Drowtales' setting ([http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?sid=6094 In a retarded troll logic]), Drow honor is based on the scale of a deed, not the justice of it (so basically it's moral to annihilate the surface and enslave everyone until somehow you feel bad, and immoral to fail, destroying the fucking moon because you failed). However, this is contradicted by all the times where drow have normal, quite human morals (that they randomly choose to ignore, taking us back to step one, namely [[Skub|cognitive dissonance]] since writers without emotional maturity and experience are not the best prospect for authoring an artifical moral code, much less parade it as art).

Of course, the canon being the result of edgy roleplay sponsors to the series, immature bondage-curious kids might have a hand at continuously smashing any drift in the Drow culture towards understanding and goodwill towards other races even when there is no motivation to continue being an asshole in a world in which Drow need a mana pool and cannot separate from communities for a long time, and there is no Lolth to worship, no mega-horror grade entities in the Underworld to militarize against (except themselves, below the earth is relatively benign, no Illithids, Beholders or Kuo-Toa), and the humans they continously enslaved and raped are so furious at their atrocities that they send entire armies forming huge, militarized kingdoms across the ocean and are willing to fight while armed with nothing but swords and the [[Imperial Guard|sheer fucking balls to jump into melee against beings who tower over them while wearing magically-crafted super metal armor and being able to control the elements and shoot mana energy bolts at will.]] No, we'll just whip up some magitech superpower and our Drow characters will reign supreme... So that we can fund our CYOA bondage porn at ehentai.com where we act with the "spoils of war" in the slave market.

How do we know this foregone conclusion? The Drow completely dominating the surface and driving the "animalistic" humans to reservations? Enter the Daydream, the epitome of faggotry since Folsom Street Fairs, explained below.

The amazing level of immature Villain Sue faggotry rises to new heights in a "Space Age" story arc about 10000 years later when Drow apparently are the sole rulers of their world and [[Wat|explore the space with mana powered spaceships and Earth of all places]]. In this arc Drow are somehow good people after millenia of slavery and genocide and help Earth humans with some civil war; only after they are beaten the crap out of when mistaking a powered-down human spacecraft for a derelict.

The humans in their own planet?

[http://www.drowtales.com/~daydream/liriel.php?sid=4102 Herded to mud hut reservations next to high tech Mary Sue cities because the artists hate humanity with such vitriol that they have to kick the dog, which they cannot do in real life.] Dorfs? Very likely extinct, along with orcs. Because it feels good to waste an amazing opportunity where humans and other non-Mana using races could be integrated as subjects amongst the Drow empire in modern times and could have their little stories of culture shock. Instead we'll just make magitek make-believe spaceships with god-tier AI's and sexy pink-purple realities in them for Drow to constantly fuck during spaceflights rather than training or even reading something which is needed for any decent modern vocation, because HOLY SHIT OHMIGOD I CAN'T GET ENOUGH FANWANK HERE. There is a cruel cosmic joke here when a webcomic with one of the worst plots in existence gets the best update rate and artists...

Skub being skub, this often boils over to related articles and websites. One example is Tv Tropes, where each and every trope pointing out the plot problems gets mercilessly deleted by sockpuppets. Or this article itself, which has been tagged with EDITWAR, because even elegan//tg//entlemen can find something to skub about, even if it's over the amount and consistency of the skub. YMMV.

[[Rage|tl;dr Space Opera, edgier and skubbier than Warhammer 40000]]

==Some Things That Don't Suck About It==

Now to render unto Caesar...

As stated, the art is outrageously above and beyond the usual webcomic fare. It really can't be stressed enough how beautiful some of the pages can get, though when other webcomics are mostly teenagers on DeviantART and you employ the best artists with porn sponsor money, that's to be expected.

The drow themselves, while ridiculously OP, are actually given some variation and complexity bordering on outright dissent from traditional oppressive values (surface traders who chill with other races and aren't dicks, Drow paladins (though the sheer dissonant and illogical design leaves much to be desired- burning humans who want to save their kin with holy fire, channeling a "good goddess" who accepts innocent sacrifices is... [[Derp|controversial at best]]) empaths, who actually treat their slaves quite well, wilderness Drow '''rednecks''' even) as a society with all of the different clans and factions. Vastly more so than the D&D drow, whose society is a forced [[Stupid Evil]] amalgam of city-states, civil wars and Grimdark theocracy of sacrifice and mass-murder.

The artist also deserves some praise for actually keeping this thing going since 2001. With 50 chapters and over 2500 pages not including the spin-offs, it is one of the longest webcomics ever and runs at an insane ''daily update rate''. The man works at a pace that makes [[Servitors]] look lazy. If only we could give some of his energy to [[A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire|GRRM]]... But then, they have a certain motivation called money, and NOT one artist...who actually employs lots of artists by the fuckton from the donations for retarded self-inserts and lines. The entire premise runs on the said faggots paying the developer for said self-inserts (when humans try to liberate their imprisoned kin, an out-of-place drow character uses a female high heel shoe to kill the desperate (and justified) attackers while shouting a cheesy retarded line...) and plot lines they want themselves, so the sheer commercial motivation should be a reason this series goes on.

==See Also==

*[[Goblins]]: A sort of inversion on Drowtales where instead of the main race being blatantly OP, the main race is constantly bullied by everyone else to show how sad they are.
*[[Edgy]]: Trying far too hard to pump up sad and/or shocking concepts in a story to the point that it grates on the most jaded nerves, usually done by immature "artists".

[[category: Webcomics]]
[[category: Skub]]

Leman Russ

2017-04-15T02:52:50Z

2001:56A:F107:D500:4803:CC2F:6EDA:B56C: Conjugation/grammar fun. Goes = To go somewhere or to happen. Go's = "Go is" which is 'wut?'

''"I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”''<br>
-[[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Genghis Khan]].

''"Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."''<br>
- Conan the Barbarian

''"NEEERRRRD."''<br>
- Leman Russ

[[Image:LEMAN_RUSS.jpg|frame|My hand is fire, my hair is rage, my pauldrons are justice and my cock is wolf. Prepare to die!]]
'''Leman Russ''', not to be confused with the [[Leman Russ (tank)|tank bearing his name]], is the primarch of the [[Space Wolves]] legion. A superhuman nordic king with a warrior's crude humor and a stubborn streak a mile wide. He was such a hard headed son of a bitch, that he's survived extended fights with [[Angron]], [[Magnus]], [[Lion El'Jonson|The Lion]], and even the Emperor himself. General all-around badass deserving of much respect, but superstitious and flawed, with a serious problem valuing others' points of view, even if he understood them. He's blonde underneath [[Rip and Tear|all the blood.]]

==Origins==
When the Primarchs were lost, Leman's capsule landed on [[Fenris]], a harsh planet of insane violence that the Norse gods shit out after a three day meth fueled orgy with a tyranid hive fleet. The locals there enjoy a life of fishing, drinking, sailing, fucking, pillaging and conquering other tribes of people for the modest little islands they all have to live on. Granted, it's also usually a very short life, because they're sharing the world with trolls, yetis, wolves the size of horses, bears the size of a house, whales that kill for fun, and krakens, which are to a squid as a [[Hierophant]] is to a [[Hormagaunt]].

So it was that little baby Russ left his capsule in the polar mountain region of Asaheim. There, some monstrous female wolf found him and said to herself "I WANT!". So Russ was raised by a dire wolf In Spess. A few years pass, Russ growing up big and strong and hairy, having a grand old time running around the mountains and killing the sheep and such of the humans there with his wolf brothers. Eventually a king named Thengir heard of the Wolf-man, and decreed he be captured and brought to his hall. The mist of ages (and retcons) have hidden the details of Thengir's first meeting with Russ. Some stories would say that Russ was bound and gagged and dragged into the hall of the King Thengir after his Wolf family was slain, others claim a hunting party stumbled across his cave and kicked off a bloody melee in which a dozen hunters were killed, along with Russ's mother, after which the hunters somehow convinced Russ to stand down and come with them, a conversation that may or may not have included copious amounts of alcohol and whores. Thengir took a wondrous interest in Russ and ordered he be educated. In a short time, Russ was trash-talking every short bastard who dared look at him the wrong way, and had become insanely good with weaponry. When Thengir finally died, all declared that Leman of the Russ become the new high King.

==The Next Step==

Russ conquered and took. He bartered and traded. He united the people of Asaheim under his rule. Somehow, the Emprah heard of it and realized it all had to be the work of a Primarch. So then he attended a royal banquet in the Hall of the Mountain Ki- I mean Leman Russ. The Emprah, taking a leaf out of Odin's book, disguised himself as some old geezer, then waited until the right moment to reveal his true identity. When he did Russ refused to bow down and challenged him to several contests, he ate so much the Emprah was forced to back down. Russ drank so much the Emprah was forced to back down. By now, the Emprah was fairly surprised at finally being out-done by someone else, Russ gazed upon the Emperor and challenged him in combat, and so did the Emprah raise his Power Glove into the air for all to see, and so did he then bring it down on Leman Russ's head, knocking him the fuck out in one solid hit.

Of course fluff changes and a 1-hit KO wasn't very fulfilling, so the new lore arrived: After the Emperor revealed himself Leman Russ skipped the eating and drinking contests and just challenged the Emperor to a fight. For hours they dueled, which ended when the Emperor punched Russ square in the face, presumably he was pissy the Leman was waving his cock in his face by just straight up fighting him, (debatable as to whether or not he was in his full armour and actually had his Power Fist at the time), and when Russ awoke, he laughed it off. Presumably he did a lot better this time by virtue of not being drunk. Afterwards he ended up in command of the one Space Marine legion that knows how to eat, drink, brawl and make war upon any asshole that mocks their Thunderwolf.

Rumour has it that the Emp was so pleased with Russ' prowess, that he thereforth tasked him and the Space Wolves to be his executioners and it seems Russ is the reason the 2nd and 11th Legions no longer exist. So he has experience fucking up a Primarch, which is pretty goddamn manly. (Not confirmed by any sources and is not more than passing conversation in one Black Library novel, other than that, yeah totally definitely didn't kill the other legions. Also if you take how he acted with Angron and Magnus, he totally hated his job of being the executioner...and apparently thought Lorgar was a pretty cool guy).

(The novel "Betrayer" contradicts almost all of this. It has Russ taking it upon himself to school the World Eaters without Emp's blessing as he was disgusted by their behavior, it has Angron defeat Russ in single combat because only he was fighting to kill while Russ was trying to teach, it then ends with the Space Wolves entirely outmaneuvering the Eaters and winning a tactical victory by surrounding Angron. The Eaters believe they won due to a higher kill count and the Wolves leave disappointed that their legion brothers were too retarded to see the lesson Russ was teaching. Even Lorgar tells Angron that he was a complete tool on that night and would have been killed)

Apart from that, Russ and his Space Wolves had a goddamn good time during the Great Crusade, although it hasn't been written about so this is all we can guess. When that fag-ass [[Horus]] started whining and crying, Leman Russ and his Legion were on their way to Prospero to bring Magnus the Red to Terra for questioning. Horus intercepted the message and re-worded it to order Russ to destroy Magnus and his Thousand Sons. Russ and the Space Wolves carried out a class-10 clusterfucking on Prospero, to the point where Leman Russ himself lifted Magnus the Red over his shoulders and broke the sorcerer's back over his knee. But even so, the red bastard managed to utter one single word of power and escaped through the fucking ground. Russ was so enraged that he ordered the 13th company of Space Wolves to pursue the fleeing Thousand Sons through their pansy-ass portals.

Despite his reputation, fighting Magnus took a serious toll on Russ. He probably knew that it was a "fair fight" only because Magnus was devastated and held back his power, with which he would have easily won, being at least the third most powerful psyker humanity, and possibly the galaxy, had ever known.

Rumour has it, that during the battle between those two demigods Magnus, by psychic means, laid his heart and mind bare to Russ, revealing that he knew not only every blow that was coming from his brother, but everything that he had come to know, accepting his failure and his fate, which was defeat. (Source?)

This shook the Wolf King deeply. But of course, he decided to carry on. An Inquisitor once called it an "emo phase" in front of a Rune Priest, and was fed balls-first to a Thunderwolf, especially when the news of the Drop Site Massacre reached the Wolves. In his own words, Russ felt he'd been "in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing". Just to make things worse, the Alpha Legion turned up to batter the Wolves, and the White Scars weren't going to help them after Prospero. Russ was forced to retreat and hide in deep space. The only real plus here was that Bjorn the Fell-Handed came to his attention, setting the young warrior on the path to ironclad badassness.

Oh and Empy totally gave him a spear with every single member of his original legion depicted fighting various gribbly xenos. Including Tyranids. Yup. Said spear was tossed into a certain Daemon Primarchs single eye, thereby preventing him from manifesting in reality AND resurrecting his legion. Russ totally hated this spear btw. At one point Russ tried to hit a moon orbiting some planet (he was drunk, don't judge) and the spear was lost for months.

== Russ and his Brothers ==

In many ways Russ can be best understood by looking at the clashes between him and his brothers, butting heads with [[Angron]], [[Magnus]], and [[Lion El'Jonson]] over the years. All three of them had much in common with Russ, and there was potential for great brotherhood there, but in large part his lack of tact or understanding crushed whatever relationship might have been.

His fight with Angron was his attempt to teach his brother a lesson. Both of them were penultimate warriors, both relied on their amazing athleticism and berzerker rages to triumph in battle, both were known for losing their temper when challenged, but Russ saw weakness in his brother's lack of strategy. Leman tried to just talk to the World Eater's primarch, but Angron was so uncontrollably, incredibly, "calm down son," angry that he just attacked Russ. While Russ and Angron were dueling, their retinues kicked off an open war, and in the battle that followed Russ found himself defeated by Angron, but Angron was in turn outmaneuvered and surrounded by the Space Wolves, thus proving Russ's lesson that warrior prowess isn't enough. That said, no one learned '''anything'''. Angron thought himself the victor because he'd won the duel and his sons had inflicted greater casualties than the wolves, but Russ thought himself the victor because he'd proven his point and "educated" his brother. If Russ had paid more attention and thought things through rather than just rushing forward to do things his way, he'd have used subtler methods of persuasion to calm Angron, as Fulgrim and especially Lorgar had done in the past. Russ may well have had an easier time of persuading Angron than either of them, given that he and Angron had a similar sense of brutal honor and a great lust for war. But, ultimately, it didn't occur to Russ to slow down and think it though, so he failed that day.

Russ really, ''really'' didn't get along with Magnus, even before the burning of Prospero. He hated that his brother used sorcery and warpcraft, despite the fact that Russ's legion ALSO USED PSYKERS. However, there is a subtle distinction; the Rune Priests of the Space Wolves use their psychic abilities in a much more limited and controlled way than the Thousand Sons, and the Rout never used Chaos familiars. They also believed that they were using the spirits of Fenris, hence all the totems and runes. Nearly all fluff indicates that this is utter horseshit, the sort of beliefs the Rout inherits from the Fenrisians. Russ' superstition led him to feud with Magnus, but so did his concerns over the threat the XVth Legion posed to the Imperium and his frustration with Magnus' tendency to abandon his allies in favor of investigating some psychic artifact or slow down a conquest to avoid damaging some books. Russ never stopped to consider that Magnus' understanding of the Warp might have been better than his, or that the things Magnus preserved might have value for the humans Russ wanted to make the Galaxy safe for. He understood where Magnus was coming from; it's just that Russ was too arrogant to admit his brother might have had some things right.

Perhaps most famous and most tragic of Russ's feuds was his strife with [[Lion El'Jonson]]. Both men had very similar origins, but slight differences in their upbringings drove a wedge between them. The Wolf and the Lion were both raised by the wild: both of their pods had crashed in areas with no humans, and they had to learn to survive with no lessons from other men. Both were eventually taken in when they were discovered by the men of their world, but that's where their stories differ. Where Russ was raised in the friendly, bawdy brotherhood of Thengir's men, the Lion was trained and educated in the somber fraternity of the knightly Order. While Russ had been brawling and singing with his friends, leading great hunts to destroy monsters and enemy tribes, the Lion was mastering discipline and embarking on solemn quests to destroy the Great Beasts of the forest. The battle between the two came on the world of Dulan, where the VIth and Ist legion were fighting together to slay a tyrant who'd insulted Russ's honor. At the beginning of the conflict the two brothers had promised to work together, but as time went on the Lion grew tired of his brother's insistence on utterly smashing every pocket of resistance rather than taking a more efficient, direct method of ending the war. Eventually he just launched an assault on the tyrant's palace, and beheaded the man before Russ could reach them. Naturally, Russ was ''furious''. Russ was an angry dickhead, the Lion was a snarky bastard, and before long blades were drawn and the two were trying to kill each other in a violent battle. After a long and bloody fight in which the two of them were beaten senseless and had fallen over the ramparts of the fortress to the ground below, Russ started laughing at the ridiculousness of what they were doing. The Lion asked if his brother would yield, a question that just confused Russ. ''The lion thought this was a duel?'' Russ had thought of the fight as a brawl between angry brothers, a quick spat that would end with both of them beaten and bloodied, something they'd laugh about over a drinks years later. The Lion however was taking it deadly serious, and while Russ was laughing, he struck a final blow, shattering Russ's skull and ending the fight. Had Russ stopped to consider his brother's mentality, or listened more closely to the Lion's words, he would have realized that the Lion saw the conflict as something profoundly different from what Russ thought it was. Again, Russ's lack of consideration was his failing.

However, while certainly abrasive, arrogant, and brutal, Russ was also every bit as loyal as Sanguinius or Dorn. The other thing Magnus, Angron, and the Lion have in common? They're all assholes. Magnus arrogantly assumes he knows best and blatantly favored psykers in his Legion. Angron is... [[Rage|self-explanatory.]] The Lion was absolutely infuriated that Russ correctly pointed out that it had been the Lion's lust for power and recognition that had led him to betray his promise to Russ. The battle took place in the days before Horus's ascension to the role of warmaster, and Russ knew his brother craved the title above all else, even above his own honor. Bottom line, his brothers all put their own feelings/goals before those of the Emperor. Not to say that Russ was tactful, diplomatic, or understanding with these three - he certainly could have handled all of these conflicts better - but Russ was never a dick just for the sake of being a dick- he was a dick because someone had to keep his brothers in line.

His relationships with his brothers also highlight another one of his traits. Fans LOVE to call him a hypocrite, and this isn't far off the mark. However, it's not quite on target either. To elaborate, Russ criticized and physically attacked his brothers for traits he or his Legion also had. On closer inspection, though, the way Russ dealt with his flaws was different from his brothers- and that's the best justification for his behavior. Russ and Angron both led Legions that were extremely violent, especially towards the defenseless. But Russ taught his Legion to temper their bloodlust and fight to make the galaxy safe for humans. Angron jammed the Butcher's Nails in the brains of the War Hounds and took their discipline and brotherhood away from them. Arguments that Russ should have been more tactful ignore that he was trying to deal with a Space Marine Legion of questionable loyalty that could and had caused massive amounts of collateral damage. There's a time for caution; it's not when rampaging supersoldiers are threatenting the Imperium and its people. As for Jonson, both Primarchs had an element of glory-seeking in their nature. Both were also very stubborn and combative, with an animalistic side. However, Russ wasn't ruled by his pride. During a dispute between the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels over a friendly fire incident, Russ personally apologized to the Lion in spite of the Dark Angels being the ones who knowingly fired on the Rout. He put aside his lust for glory and victory to save the lives of his men, then privately made it clear [[Rip and Tear|what would happen should the Dark Angels do something similar again.]] The Lion put his own reputation before the lives of his men. This distinction justifies Russ' initial hatred of Jonson. With Magnus, the accusations of hypocrisy carry more weight. Russ' attempts to cover up the Curse of the Wulfen are uncomfortably similar to Magnus' treatment of the flesh change, and both Legions did use psykers. However, the Rune Priests are much more cautious than the sorcerers of the Thousand Sons. More importantly, the Space Wolves treat the Wulfen as a curse- a failing. They don't glorify it or think it makes them better than the other Legions. The Thousand Sons treat their psyker powers as a badge of superiority, taking any excuse to use them. They revel in what makes them unique without considering its links with the flesh change. Russ made sure he could control his secrets. Magnus was controlled by his secrets and saw them as strengths.

TL;DR: Russ shared many failings with his brothers, but he was defined by his controlled savagery. His bloodlust never overtook his discipline. His glory-seeking never overrode his sense of responsibility. He made sure his sons worked against their curse rather than have them embrace it. Is it any wonder that someone who worked so hard for control hated people who thought they didn't need it? In this light, is it really hypocritical?

== Post-Heresy ==

Although unable to return to aid the Imperium in the Battle for Terra, Russ and the Space Wolves threw themselves headfirst into the post-heresy war efforts. Aside from spanking the traitors into the Eye of Terror, he came up with the concept for the Adeptus Praeses. Though he'd told Guilliman where he could shove his Codex, Russ liked the idea of successor chapters for the Wolves. To him (or the little reformist movement within the Legion later, the fluff isn't totally clear), they were a way of maintaining the Wolves' influence alongside that of Girlyman, Dorn and the rest. Unfortunately the Wolves' gene-seed proved too unstable to set up any viable successor chapters, and as a result while the Ultramarines, Imperial Fists and Dark Angels have shedloads of descendants, the Wolves are the sole embodiment of Russ' strength and drive. This hasn't helped their situation with Imperial institutions such as the Inquisition.

One-hundred years to the day after the Emperor's internment on the Golden Throne, during a feast in the halls of the Space Wolves fortress, Russ climbed upon a table to give a speech. He was stricken with a vision, and after standing there speechless for a few minutes, he fell to one knee, issued hushed orders to his retinue, and left. He left his sons with their first Wolf Lord; [[Bjorn the Fell Handed]], and a message.

"In the end, I will be there. For the final battle. For dinner time."

And then the winds of change blew over the fluff once again. In the audio play Parting of Ways we get a slightly different version of events. There was still an annual feast, though it wasn't just to celebrate the day the Emperor got the snot beaten out of him by Horus, but also to commemorate the space wolves that had died during the spring cleaning that followed the heresy, plus the completion of the Fang - the giant fortress of the Space wolves.
Also instead of a hundred years, it was two hundred years since the siege of Terra, so unless Dorn was a really slow learner and not very bright and it took him over a hundred years to assemble the golden throne, that is a clear lore change. Then again, given how Perturabo thoroughly kicked Dorn's ass in the iron cage, forcing papa smurf and the Ultrasmurfs to come and save Dorn's sorry ass, it's a possibility that Dorn just wasn't very bright. It's also a possibility that the Emperor got the Golden Throne from an old IKEA warehouse, which would explain why even a primarch would have had trouble in figuring out how to put it together in less than a hundred years.

Also Russ wasn't about to hold a speech, instead he had at first partaken in the festivities but as the party grew sullen, Russ retreated, sensing, as Bjorn put it, "a fell wind from beyond the mountains, bleeding through the cracks of the fang". After clenching the table for a while, Russ clambered to his feet on the table, screaming ''“No More!”'' The shout silenced the Space Wolves in their brawling and made the flags of the smoke filled halls tremble, so Russ apparently also had a gift for speech, plus he had a gift for getting instantly sober as Bjorn described his face going from being ruddy flushed with mjod to looking like an ice specter.
He then held a kickass speech ''“We come here to celebrate the allfather, we come here to remember his sacrifice and his ascension from the world of the senses and his victory over my brother the traitor.”
''“We remember the dead, who even now gather in the oververse, their blade sharp, their aim keen.”''
''“They are better than we are for they perished in war to end all wars and their souls have been purified! And what of us those left behind, wallowing in the drinks the fallen gods have left us?”''
''“We have grown fat, we have the beast within us, but is has never yet been mastered.”''
Then Russ grabbed his drinking horn and held it aloft and continued
''“So let us celebrate my father's ascension, let us remember what he was able to accomplish, let us remember what he built and what he foresaw and then what he lost and how he failed.”''
''“Do not morn the fact that he no longer walks among us, for the galaxy was too small to accommodate such soul, he was of an age of '''gods!''' And we are slumped in an age of mortals.”''
''“The lights of the stars will fade, this place will grow old and the ice will crack it.”''
''“We will forget no matter how much the skalds tell the old tales, what battles are left for us like the ones before?”''
''“My fallen brothers are gone, Malcador is gone, the leeches cluster around the golden throne and whisper of deeds done before they were born as if it where '''they''' who achieved them.”''
At this point Russ looked unsteady on his feet and his eyes went glassy
''“A doubt of all of this, one thing remains true we were not on Terra, we were not there when the palace fell and that shame will pursue us for eternity.”''
Then Russ dropped his drinking horn on the board and then started to speak not to his warriors, but to himself or to some presence that was unseen.
''“It remains unfinished… I have waited for too long, building this mountain squabbling with Gulliman, I will not grow old, feeble, limping around a crumbling inheritance, I have and Oath to keep there are beasts left to slay.”''
At this point Russ where fully immersed in his premonitions and he looked around the room a smile dancing on his fanged face, seeing thing from either long ago or yet to come.
''“Listen by closely my brothers, there shall come a time far from now, where the chapter itself is dying and our foes shall gather to destroy us.”''
''“Then my sons I shall listen for your call, in whatever realm holds me and come I shall, no matter what the laws of life and death forbid.”''
''“At the end I will be there for the final battle FOR THE WOLF TIME!”''

Then Russ gave the mustering signal and he and his retinue left, though as Bjorn made to follow only to have Russ turn towards him saying a single sentence ''“Not you.”''
When Bjorn asked for an explanation all Russ did was repeat the words ''“Not you.”''
Then he left.

It is theorized that Russ like Magnus had the gift of premonition and knew that Bjorn would be needed in the years to come as the first Great Wolf, as it is heavily implied that if Bjorn hadn't been persuaded to take the mantle of great wolf, the chapter itself would have fallen apart in the absence of Russ.

More likely Russ just didn't want Bjorn's moodiness to poison what ever adventure he was on.

As to where Russ went and what happened to him there's a few theories given

The Russ sought the Lion out to make amends of their old feuding (if so they both forgot to tell both their chapters about it)

That he fought in eternal combat with the resurrected cadaver of Horus (no that would be Abaddon's task and he completely owned that clone of Horus)

That he searched for the tree of life to heal the Emperor's soul (if so it will be needed sorely needed, as Abaddon blasted a remnant of the Emperor's soul, watching it decay in front of him)

That he is trapped within a hollow star and tormented by his old adversary Magnus (Since Tzeentch was able to trap Sigmar in another dimension, trapping Russ in a hollow star and have his star pupil Magnus use him as a punching bag makes as much sense as anything)

That he is actually searching for Magnus, to finish the last task given to him by the Emperor and "arrest" his wayward brother.

That he had passed beyond the bounds of space and time and now roamed among the gods, ready to return when needed accompanied by the fallen of his legion sundered in a paradise of warriors (so basically he's in the Age of Sigmar at this point? somebody put him out of his misery, that's not a paradise that's hell on earth)

That he's simply lost in the galactic fjord known as the Warp and has been playing drunken pranks on daemonic villagers for 10,000 years.

/tg/ theorizes that Leman Russ may return as [[Horo]] (Implying Horo isn't just one of Leman's many, many bastard children growing up on some shithole Feudal world).

Magnus actually know where is Russ now, but he don't tell it even to his trusted sorcerer lords.

The 13th company, and a figure bearing the likeness of Russ, was spotted during the 13th crusade and the siege of the capital of cadia.

==On The Tabletop==
{| border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" align="left"
! || Pts || WS || BS || S || T || W || I || A || Ld || Sv
|-
| '''Leman Russ:''' || 455 || 9 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 7 || 6 || 10 || 2+/4++
|}<br style="clear: both; height: 0px;" /><br>

An impressive stat-line, even by the insane standards of Primarchs, is coupled with unbelievably powerful wargear:
*The '''Armour Elavagar''' starts as your bog-standard 2+/4++ which is increased to a 3++ against flamer (in case that Marksmen Veteran with a Combiflamer or Heavy Flamer rolled a 6 wounding you), melta, and plasma weapons, but the truly <strike>awesome</strike> bullshit part is that it imposes -1 to hit on anyone in BtB with him, which is increased to a -2 after the first round of combat - combined with his insane WS this means nothing save [[Khaine|WS]][[Bloodthirster|10]] can hit him at better than 5+ on the first turn (Fulgrim wishes his shiny armour was as reliable) and [[Cheese|6+]] on the second. Anything that can't [[Corax|Hit]]'n'[[Konrad Curze|Run]] is gonna be stuck in CC with Russ with little to no chance of hurting him until he kills it. Do note however that it ''only'' works in BtB contact, so the models not directly in contact with Russ would still hit him as usual (likely on 5+ due to his insane WS).
Basically, he's insanely tanky against hordes.
*The '''Axe of Helwinter''' is a ''+2 master-crafted power axe with sunder and without unwieldy'' for your vehicle-wrecking needs and putting some more guaranteed wounds on high toughness opponents.
*The '''Sword of Balenight''' is a Shredding AP2 power sword; oh wait, it also has '''Sever Life'''. If Russ' prey suffers one or more wounds from the sword, roll a 2d6. If this result beats your target's toughness, add 1d3 additional wounds.
**Thanks to vague wording, when you must make the test for Sever Life is a subject of debate. Some say "suffering one or more wounds" means that the rule applies immediately before saves are made. HOWEVER, the rule clearly states that Sever Life is used only if the model "is not slain" by the initial attacks, and you HAVE to make your save rolls in order to know if they are slain or not, so one can lawfully argue that ''unsaved'' wounds are the real trigger. Keep calm and make it clear with your opponent until a FAQ is released.
*For ranged fights he has the [[Vulkan]]-remade bolter (mentioned to be regular one until Xzibit got his hands on it) turned into a pistol for Primarch's hand, called '''Scornspitter''' which is assault 3 AP3 rending, but with pitiful 12" range (of course if you aren't within 12", then you can't charge, and if you can't charge you're running therefore even if it did have a greater than 12" range it wouldn't be used anyway).

Meanwhile, his Sire of the Space Wolves gives him Night Vision, Counter-Attack, Preternatural Senses, and Hunter's Gait: all Wolves get +1Ld and Russ gets to Awoo once per game (letting everyone in his detachment reroll run and charge for said turn). Breaker of Shields, Bringer of Ruin gives weapon mastery (like Horus and Calgar). If he's Warlord, you can take Veteran Tacticals (who may run/shoot bolters then charge instead of regular Vet tactics) and Varagyr Terminators as troops.

On paper, Russ like a very expensive torpedo that is only good at tying stuff in combat and killing it, and adds only a bit to his army. However, the LD bonus, his ability to massively increase your army's board-crossing ability, and take Veteran Tacs, who just may be the best infantry in 30k, as compulsory troops combine to make him a reasonably strong force multiplier. Unlike Angron he's tough enough to withstand ranged firepower for a while, while being much more resistant to tarpitting than Perturabo or Vulkan. However, like Angron, he isn't very mobile on his own, and as such will need a transport. However, Hunter's Gait mitigates this slightly, and he could always just Outflank with Vets. Take him with the Pale Hunters, point him at the biggest CC threat your enemy has, and if you're smart with Vet tactics and when you Howl your army will be great.

==Leman Russ VS other Primarchs:==
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">
Inferno is finaly released and you came here to see how your favorite/most hated superhuman demi-god fares against the other Primarchs, because you love delicious Mathammer trolling and cautious planning before battle.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''<big>THEY ALL DIE. EVERY. LAST. ONE. OF. THEM.</big>'''

Sever Life on The Sword of Balenight is the real kicker here. Allowing him to potentially pile on more wounds then what would normally be possible for the amoung of attacks he has. And since most primarchs only have a 4++, they tend to die in short order (with even the tougher ones eventually going down from sheer wound output). So if you want to add the damage for Sever Life, here's the results:

*Against T6 Sever Life will cause an additional 1.091 Wounds on average.
*Against T7 Sever Life will cause an additional 0.909 Wounds on average.
::Note that these are Wounds that can still be saved via Invulnerable saves.

This is made even crazier with his ability to split his attacks between his axe of awesome and his sword of cheese (Yes just like Horus). Since all it takes is one wound going through to trigger Sever Life thus he can lay on the hurt with his high strength axe while still getting some good jabs in with his sword. When combined with the additional wounds from sever life (assuming it goes off, which against most Primarchs it should since they are mostly in the T6 range) this guy can lay on more wounds on a single target than just about any other Primarch (except a fully buffed Angron, though to be fair that is really all Angron has got going in a fight).

Actually, far worse than Sever Life (which probably is intended to trigger after saves, hence the "Is not slain" part) is his armor, which cripples almost every Primarch's ability to damage him with the negatives to hit. Since thanks to his insane weapon skill almost all will be needing 6's or 5's at best to even hit him, and after taking wound rolls and saves into account he is basically taking almost no damage. Which really hurts alot of his opponents since most of their special rules in CC rely on doing damage (e.g. Horus disabling strike and Perturabo's fancy hammer with basically every CC special rule). Even the uber-tanks are left flailing at him, barely doing any damage, while he grinds them out.

The only ones who can even stand a snowballs chance are heavy-hitters in the range of Horus, Fulgrim, Angron with maximum attacks, Ferrus Manus, Perturabo and a fully buffed Magnus. In addition a Transfigured Lorgar might be able to tar pit him for awhile (though don't expect him to actually win). But I do mean snowball, even these guys barring some amazing rolls will probably lose virtually every fight (including Horus).

HOWEVER if you or your opponent plays him in a 40k list he can potentially be tar pitted with assault terminator with thunder hammers and storm shields. Russ is not immune to concussion and the invun save is superior than Russ. This will bring him down to an equal playing field since while they will not be doing much damage to him (since needing 6s to hit) he will probably not be able rip throw them before the game ends (he is more a challenge monster than infantry wrecker, again that is Angrons job). Though don't rely on this as like all primarchs he is perfectly capable of wiping them out.
</div>

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Leman russ by alexboca-d7930sk.jpg|Leman Russ being the biggest pimp this side of Segmentum Solar.
File:Russ_Behind.jpg| RUN <s> FORREST </s> LEMAN, RUN!
File:Russ_Front.jpg| He's running so [[White Scars|fast]] because he saw someone throw a stick.
File:Russ_Side.jpg| Here's hoping forgeworld gives him good rules when HH book 7 drops, His model deserves them.
</gallery>

{{Primarchs}}

[[Category:Space Wolves]]

==See Also==
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Q8uymv0vw&index=2&list=PLdPq6mYy-DRdA9aTRJghfDsQiyR5WLs7y/ Admit it, this is the only song that truly befits the glory of the Sons of Russ.]
* [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mzkqA4-4jIM/ Not so fast.]