Editing Ethereal (section)

==Killing an Ethereal==
This being 40K, there is no small amount of writing on what happens when an Ethereal gets blown the fuck up on the field of battle. Without fail this sends the rest of the Tau soldiers into a brief panic attack and state of intense grief. The enemy forces at this point have a great opportunity to capitalize; if they move quickly enough they can butcher and rout the rest of the Tau in short order. If they aren't quick enough, however, the Tau will replace "panic attack" with "[[RIP AND TEAR|just fucking attack]]" and [[Dakka|set all their guns to full auto]], and unload bullet after bullet into the enemy who closed the distance right into maximum [[rape]] range thinking they had an easy victory. Sometimes in especially shitty writing the death of an Ethereal has no immediate or detrimental effect, such as in the Taros Campaign and Mont'ka, where two Ethereals die but nobody cares about the first and the second is immediately covered up by a government conspiracy (no the Tau who knew don't seem bothered either). Given that the second Ethereal was Aun'Va, the most revered of Ethereals, you'd figure they'd be a bit more bothered, and instead of replacing him with a living Ethereal they've chosen to keep him around as a hologram in a chair for about 200 years or so, because apparently that makes more sense. In both Dawn of war Dark Crusade and Soul Storm taking out the Ethereal is the win condition for any faction taking out the Tau in their stronghold and it's portrayed as routing the whole force, ending the entire Tau ability to even continue to wage war against the other powers.

The [[crunch]] has gone through a few different phases of representing this. In the past, a dead Ethereal would mean all remaining Tau forces gain Preferred Enemy, but also have to take a leadership test and thus risk running off the board. This wasn't really fun, since the Ethereals were pretty damn shit in those days anyway, and your options were either find a way to get the Ethereal killed right at the start (when you're more able to regroup a fleeing squad) or just take a Shas'O instead you idiot. Starting in 6th edition they changed things around to be less fluffy but also less shit: now, the Ethereal himself gives buffs to his army, but give the Tau's opponent scores a bonus victory point if they manage to kill the Ethereal.