SON OF VULKAN

bringing this back because the black comedy beat here was impeccable

Szeras really went: "watch your language, you little shit" <3

Warhammer 40,000: Pariah Nexus

"Your" faith? Trooper Audra, we are soldiers of the Imperium and servants of the God-Emperor of Mankind. It is our faith which you are so flippantly denigrating, and if your commissar were around he'd have you flogged for it.

Pariah Nexus is annoying because it is a pretty quality showing for Warhammer in animation but it's locked away in the utterly pointless digital prison of Games Workshop IPs known as Warhammer Plus. Fuck Warhammer Plus. Just put a fully fledged series on a standard streaming service. Something like the Pariah Nexus has the capacity to be succesful 3d animation like Clone Wars or Dragon Prince or even Transformers but that will never happen because no normal Human is gonna buy Warhammer Plus. GW has their head shoved so far up their own ass regarding how they market stuff to people outside TT Wargaming.

No I didn't pay for it. Neither should you.

Memento mori

A fanart of Pariah Nexus Series.

Some Pariah Nexus crusade games.

So far team Protectors are in the lead, with Seekers following closely behind.

Good games by all today, with a total of 8 matches completed.

Me: complaining on the internet can get unhealthy fast. Focus on praising and analyzing the things you like instead of ranting!

Also me: what the actual hell is Pariah Nexus doing with this stupid Power of Faith nonsense? I hate it. I hate it so much. Why does "faith" overcome the stilling effects of the pylon network? When psyker abilities specifically do not work because the pylons cut off the warp the thing that makes the magic work?? It makes sense on exactly zero levels. In-universe, so-called miracles are specifically called out as being manifestations of psyker abilities/mass acts of will influencing the warp. This is the entire freaking point! The religious zealots with their "miracles" are exactly the same as the "witches" they are hunting. WHY IS FAITH SUDDENLY A DIFFERENT SUPER POWER? Why are you undermining one of the most significant thematic through-lines of the Imperium with this bible camp bullshit? How can you be a critique of theocratic fascism and religious dogma when no actually the religious fanaticism works and is gonna save the day! In a way that literally contradicts how the setting works on a metaphysical level. Because the big scary godless robots just don't understand the power of believing in golden sky daddy! THANKS I HATE IT

watched the warhammer 40k pariah nexus eps, god i am loving the salamanders more and more every day. i even recently painted a mini salamander before i even knew the series existed. I am calling him now Sa'kan.

I love him so much you cannot believe it.

While a bunch of funny things happened in the Pariah Nexus, my absolute favourite is the way both Necrons and AdMech went about unleashing their most devastating doomsday-weaponry.

For the Necrons it was a process of "boss told us to get the evil stuff we put in the very-bad-not-honorable-warfare-storage". This was a controversial decision within Necron nobility, further escalating the conflict between The Silent King and The Stormlord which had gotten pretty out of hand already.

For the AdMech it was a little different - they just put out a message on all channels saying: "ATTENTION ALL PERSONEL - USE OF PERSONAL PROJECTS IS NOW PERMITTED" and the message was not even out of the aether yet when half a planet and the Necron fleet close to it was kromch'd out of existence.

So... Pariah Nexus

I found it to be a swinging pendulum of quality. Back and fourth between badass and just kinda bad.

The action and animation are astounding and there are some fantastic bits of dialogue discussing faith and fanatasism. All great stuff.. buuuuut my biggest issues are with the tone and the plot.

It's the issue a LOT of Games Workshop stories suffer from. They want to be Dune meets All Quiet On The Western Front but also G.I. JOE meets Masters Of The Universe. A Grim Dark brutal depressing war story.... but a toy commercial at the same time. SPOILERS

The plot is set well after the end of a war for this one planet the Sisters of Battle, (Nuns with Guns in SPACE) Space Marines, (Marines IN SPACE) and the Imperial Guard (Starship Trooper normal humans with laser rifles.... IN SPACE) were defending against the Necron. (Alien mummy robots FROM SPACE!) The humans lost and now it is all over but the crying. A Sister, a Space Marine and a Guard are stuck behind enemy lines with a handful of civilian survivors and must fight their way past the remaining Necron and their nanomachine human zombies to get to safety.

The SIster and the Guard have some GREAT moments of debate on the nature of faith and duty showing the Sister's fanaticism and the cracks in her faith when contrasted with the Guard's more grounded and practical view of their shared religion. This all reminds the audience that Warhammer 40K is a nightmare distopia hellscape and the Imperium of Man is BAD. At least until the Space Marine shows up and "OH WOW HE IS SO COOL AND SO NICE AND HE LOVES DEFENDING CIVILIANS! PLEASE DO NOT READ MORE LORE AND LEARN THAT THE SPACE MARINES ARE ALSO BAD AND COMMIT WAR CRIMES! BUY OUR TOYS BUY OUR TOYS!!"

The closest thing to a character arc in the story is the Sister of Battle going from having disdain for the civilians, believing their lack of faith lost the war for the planet, to finally being convinced to not be such a starch ass and defend the literal women and children from killer robots...

...

...

and then she is imediatly shot by a robot sniper. YEAH. "I will now decide to NOT be a total jerk and help these people!" *BLAM* "...ouch... nevermind I guess?" She doesn't get a last desperate second wind action surge to kill the sniper and save the civilians, she just dies. As for that Guard she was debating with the entire time? She wasn't real. She was just a ghost in her head cuz battlefield trauma is a hell of a drug. The big heroic Space Marine (who's just such a great guy) agrees to stay behind and fight the evil killer space robot and tells the civilians to keep running. He survives and tells the Big Bad Super Robot that he and his fellow humans of the Imperium will keep fighting FOR THE IMPERIUM AND THE EMPEROR BLA BLA BLA BUY OUR TOYS!!!!! Then there is an epilogue of the last surviving civilian making it to a troop of other Guard... ... ... and then getting shot because they thought the literal child was infected with the Necron Zombie Nanomachine plague. So yeah.... everyone (except the cool Space Marine) died for nothing. We don't even get to see the Space Marine's reaction to the news. The story just ENDS. He lost an arm trying to keep these people safe and the story won't even tell us if he is sad or mad or just mildly annoyed. "EVERYONE DIES CUZ WAR IS BAD AND WRONG!!!! Please buy our toys and play our games." I'm NOT saying the story should have been sunshine and rainbows but at least have all that buildup and character death MEAN something besides pizza cutter all edge no point grimdark. Have the Sister die FIGHTING and saving someone. Show the Space Marine REACTING to the news that none of the civilians survived. OR if you still want to be grim and dark, have that lone survivor kid get DRAFTED BUY THE GUARD and sent back to fight. Show his face go from "oh boy I'm saved" to "oh no I'm going BACK?!"

all in all I can't recomend Paraiah Nexus. Three episodes behind a Warhammer+ subscription paywall all for story/tone whiplash. Go watch the Hellsreach fan animation instead.

Conflict in Literature + Necron Books

(Read more for titles and notes, watch out for spoilers)

Man vs. Nature - Devourer This is not the only necron vs. tyranid lit, but I thought the cover illustrated the conflict best. Out of all the horribad things in WH40K, the tyranids tend to be presented as the closest faction to a natural disaster; certainly in Devourer they do not logically justify their presence, nor can they be reasoned with, not by the Blood Angels or Anrakyr or the Tomb World he's trying to wake. Not mindless, but an amoral happenstance, like nature itself.

Man vs. Society - The Lords of Borsis Necron court intrigue played straight, with a sprinkle of delusion on the side. Since this story revolves entirely around the schemings and plottings of necron(tyr) society, with changes in dynastic hierarchy as the final objective, it fits best here.

Man vs. Technology - Indomitus This is an awkward placement, since Indomitus was not, well... a compelling story, with most of its tropes not being explored beyond their first introduction. But it is the most bare-bones way of describing this book's premise. Humans battling a robotic malignancy, albeit with a Bolivian Army Ending, which doesn't conclude the plot in either direction 😞

Man vs. Man - The Twice-Dead King: Ruin Ruin is an exceptionally deep novel, and fits every conflict listed here. It was the hardest one to place, because it's not so much choosing the one that goes best, rather crossing off every other conflict not central to the story. Both gods and the absence-of-gods are a problem in Ruin, as well as nature and technology, but they're not at the heart of Oltyx's problem. Society could be a big one, since Oltyx is an exile - but he’s not trying to antagonize his society throughout Ruin, he's trying to work with it, or at least save it from doom. Self and reality both count, but fit better with other stories in the Nate Crowley corpus. So man vs. man it is. His most important clashes are all with individuals ('man') - Djoseras, Unnas, Hemiun, arguably Yenekh in reserve - and by the end, his crownworld is overrun by the Imperium, who will become the antagonists for the second part of his tale. Man vs. 'Man', with a capital M.

Man vs. Self - The Twice-Dead King: Reign Again, this could have gone elsewhere. In man vs. reality, perhaps, or the god-related ones. But the self is where the conflict of Reign truly lies, since Oltyx's greatest obstacle is himself, and it is his inability to accept that which brings his dynasty close to destruction. Thank goodness he got over that one.

Man vs. Reality - Severed The emotional and philosophical core of this novella relies on it. Zahndrekh's inability to see the world as it is brings about the whole plot, and is at the centre of all of Obyron's musings. Interestingly, reality does not win at the end, at least not what necrons envision reality to be: a place of cold hard facts, with no room for emotion. Zahndrekh would rather dream the impossible dream, which might be the healthier way to deal with their situation.

Man vs. God - The Infinite and the Divine 🚨 𝔻𝕆 ℕ𝕆𝕋 𝔹𝔼 𝔻𝔼ℂ𝔼𝕀𝕍𝔼𝔻 🚨

Man vs. No God - Crusade: Pariah Nexus Not a novel, not 100% about necrons, not even out yet as of now (Dec 2023). This is an inherently problematic conflict for WH40K, because gods are very real and very present in that universe... here I'm only thinking about the necron perspective, and the civil war unfolding in their lore. They banded together in a shared purpose eons ago, destroying the Old Ones who oppressed them, and sundering the star gods who subjected them to biotransference. Now they are as antigod as they could be, and they did not retain their bonds, they have once again turned on each other. So it goes.

Man vs. Author - Codex: Necrons (10th Ed.) (Collector's Ed.) James Workshop knows what they did. 😑

Games workshop please stop making me attracted to the worst possible Necrons.

Szeras’ voice and sheer size got me actin unwise.

Warhammer 40,000: Pariah Nexus

Yeah, that's definitely a bigger, better version of Orikan the Diviner.

Kind of a scrawny, goofy looking guy. I guess even undead alien robots can eat their Wheaties.

The bigger takeaway is that there was a perfect opportunity to tie in a campaign release with a promotional video series and GW managed to squander it.