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#t'au empire
alternativeminiatures · 9 months
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Source @ChumiiCham
These chaos-taus (Chaus? Thaus?) look fucking fantastic.
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T'au Waster Caste: "With the power of delicate diplomacy and masterfully conducted negotiations another planet has been brought into our Empire without the need for senseless and wasteful bloodshed. Not a single shot fired! Now THIS is how you do this properly and most important of all: peacefully."
Meanwhile T'au Earth Caste, collectively:
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titanomancy · 2 months
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New kroot. Noot.
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cursed-40k-thoughts · 9 months
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Ciaphas Cain but he defects accidentally to the Tau
Cain spends two full pages of the new novel weeping over a bowl of oatmeal that has actual flavours in it
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pauliusthemad-blog · 5 months
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No more shovel memes, only giant women and greater good!
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Had a bit of fun with a random idea I had in my head...
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vlepkaaday · 21 days
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I was trying to put it here last week, but Tumblr kept failing to upload the progress video for whatever reason... So I'll just post the final thing and if you want to see the video you need to find me on Instagram :D
ANYWAYS here's a sexy pinup Ta'u firewarrior! I decided to reuse the character I did for the Firewarrior energy drink piece. I also reused the same colour scheme but added a bit of red to keep it more eye-catching:)
Born into a military family in the T'au Empire, Shas'la Kaisa defied tradition by pursuing her passion for physical fitness over becoming a Fire Warrior. Spending hours in the gym sculpting her physique, Kaisa became renowned for her impressive strength and agility. T'au Central Command recognized her potential as a symbol of strength and resilience for the Empire, and Kaisa embraced the opportunity.
Her image soon adorned recruitment posters and propaganda broadcasts, inspiring troops with her muscular physique and determined expression. Though she diverged from the path expected of her, Kaisa found a unique way to serve her people. Her unwavering dedication became a testament to the power of determination within the T'au Empire. Despite her deviation from tradition, Kaisa's commitment to fitness and strength served as a powerful reminder of unity and resolve in the face of challenges.
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sallymander40k · 9 months
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Why The Tau Were Never 'Too Good' For 40k
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The Tau were added midway through Warhammer 40,000's 3rd edition, though according to some records the idea had been floating around since Laserburn. In the twenty years since their introduction to the 41st millennium, the Tau have remained one of the most consistently reviled and hated aspect of 40k lore, with all complaints around them boiling down to one core issue: they're too good for 40k. By that, people mean that they are too morally good to fit within the grimdark narrative of the 41st millennium. This has always been the primary complaint levied at them, since they were first introduced in 2001. And GW has seemingly agreed with them, and spent the last 20 years trying to inject grimdarkness into the Tau Empire.
The first attempt to grimdarkify the Tau came very early on, with the Tau campaign in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
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It's explained how in the decade following Tau victory on Kronus the remaining human population was subjugated, oppressed, forced to give up their culture, and eventually simply sterilized and allowed to die off naturally to create a Tau and Kroot ethnostate on Kronus. It explains this over images of prisoners of war being fed to Krootox in prison camps and humans huddling together in slums.
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This is obviously a departure from the image of the Tau as it was established in Codex: Tau (3rd Edition), as that codex makes explicit mention of the Tau trading and making alliances with frontier human colonies. This is also a departure from... common sense. Why exactly would the Tau accept Kroot, Vespid, Nicassar, Demiurg, Tarellians and many others into their ranks but then arbitrarily draw the line at humans?
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This would become a pattern that I like to call "The Grimderp Tau Cycle." It's not exactly a stretch to say that the Tau are easily the most morally good society in the 41st millennium. Their tolerance toward other species alone makes them head and shoulders above almost any other species in the galaxy. So to remind people that there are no good guys in the 41st millennium and that this is a very serious and grimdark setting that you need to take seriously because there are no good guys or whatever, GW will occasionally have the Tau commit a completely out of character, random, and nonsensical atrocity. This was also seen at the end of In Harmony Restored, the short story that came out alongside 8th edition's Psychic Awakening: The Greater Good.
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For context, In Harmony Restored is a short story about a group of Gue'vesa soldiers (human auxiliary troops fighting in the Tau military) performing a desperate defensive rearguard action to halt an Imperial advance long enough for Tau reinforcements to come and smash the delayed invasion force. The Gue'vesa are able to do this, though at great sacrifice to themselves, and then when the reinforcing army does arrive and makes quick work of the Imperial army they then continue on to butcher the Gue'vesa soldiers who performed this valiant holding action for... Seemingly no reason? Assuming the Tau forces thought they were more Astra Militarum soldiers, the Gue'vesa step out of cover pleading for mercy, only to be gunned down. With one of the Gue'vesa at the end noting that the language one of the Battlesuit pilots is using is very reminiscent of the way the Imperium talks about those they've labeled undesirables.
The message here is clear: these humans betrayed the Imperium in order to escape from the Imperium's genocidal regime... Only to end up in the equally merciless clutches of an equally ruthless oppressor. But, from a lore standpoint, that defeats the entire purpose of the Tau. It makes them wholly indistinct and, frankly, boring. But that doesn't even scratch the surface of how stupid this is, because it has clearly been stated in the past that the Tau do not hold bigotries toward client species on the basis of their faiths. And that makes sense.
Not only does this contradict previous lore, not only does it render the Tau a boring palette swapped version of the Imperium, it also just defies practical sense. If you're a race like the Tau, who expand primarily through ingratiating yourself with other races and convincing them to join your collective, you'd naturally want as few barriers between potential client races and joining as possible. No human colony is going to voluntarily join the Greater Good if the Tau's version of the Greater Good happens to require that the human population of that planet lose all sense of their heritage and culture through forced reeducation and the abandonment of their faith, and in the long term for that human population to slowly go extinct through gradual forced sterilization and confinement to ghettos and slums.
It's deeply stupid, lazy writing on the part of GW to repair the image of the Tau in the eyes of a fandom who accused the faction of being "too good." Except, uhm, here's the thing: the Tau were never too good to begin with. Lets rewind back to 3rd Edition's Tau Codex, our first introduction to the Tau in the 40k universe. From the very beginning it was very clear that the Utopian idealism of the Tau Empire held beneath the surface a significantly more sinister and malevolent nature, and it all roots from the mysterious and enigmatic fifth caste of Tau Society: the Ethereals.
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In 3rd Edition, the Ethereals are spoken of more like mythological beings than the slightly mundane way they exist in modern 40k. All we know about them out of this book is that they are the autocratic leaders of the Tau Empire who inspire radical devotion among the Tau, though are rarely seen or heard from. They reorganized Tau society with pursuit of the Greater Good in mind first. But the specifics of what that means matters a lot. Tau are born into a caste that roughly determines, from birth, what role in society that person will fulfill. Those born into a caste are not allowed to have children with members of other castes, are not allowed to take up any job or position that contradicts the societal purpose of their caste, and generally lack self-determination in regards to things like career choice.
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so, bam, the setup for Tau as a flawed and morally ambiguous faction are already present. They're a faction who fight for a better future, for a galaxy where all can exist in harmony with one another, so long as that harmony is kosher by the standards of the Ethereal caste. In that sense they're somewhat similar to the Dominion from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A multispecies interstellar collective who seek to create a galaxy harmoniously unified... in service to the Founders. Just taken from this vision of the Tau Empire, they're already an autocratic dictatorship who fight in the name of an ideology that declares itself to be for the greater good of all who ascribe to it while also relying on the assumption that the tyrannical power of the Ethereals must inherently be for the Greater Good. I reject the idea that the Tau were ever "too good" for 40k. Rather that they were written with a realistic level of nuance, with an understanding that dictatorships are built upon cognitive dissonance, not on perfectly consistent virtues.
TL;DR THEY'RE NOT FUCKING COMMUNISTS, THEY LITERALLY HAVE A CASTE SYSTEM, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!
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eloiduarte · 7 months
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I really like this bit of Tau propaganda (from the Vigilus stuff). Not only because, given the abysmal standards of the Imperium, this might as well be live footage, but also due to further context.
In the novel Outgunned, since the protagonist is an imperial propagandist on a miserable assignment to an active warzone, we're given descriptions of the kind of propaganda the Imperium produces. And it's mostly terrible, the magnum opus of the protagonist being a biography of a Saint where he beats heretics to death with his own severed leg. That one is considered masterful (according to its author, at least).
So, basically, Tau filmmakers understand human cinematic language much better than imperial ones. Which is very funny.
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hairymonkeyhands · 3 months
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Store anniversary model, a Tau Ethereal!
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I like this, I want at least one, but I'd like a few more!
The staff was from a rumour engine post last year, it has a symbol for each of the castes, I wonder if that means anything for the model range? Earth, Water, Air, having some models from those castes would add some character to the army.
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bastard-pyro · 8 months
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Newsflash, the Admech have an augmentation to make them more racist.
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An excerpt taken from Fire Warrior, by Simon Spurrier, and published by Black Library on September 2003. The text reads as it follows:
of sophistication. Like some energistic equivalent of the gantry surrounding the powercore, the ship's logic engine was a structured gem: a perfectly aligned arrangement of operative tiers and commands, symmetrical and cohesive. Had his sense of awe been complete, he suspected, he might actually be impressed by the technology's complexity. As it was, the puritens surgery released a stream of disapproving endorphins into his mind, filling him with revulsion and making him all the more aware of the xenogens blatant disregard for the proper obeisance owed to the Machine God.
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potpourrifandoms · 1 month
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Even more out-of-context pages from my silly little passion-project Warhammer Comic, featuring some of the early years of my Water Caste boys <3
More comic can be found here, here, and here if you're not too concerned about lore-friendliness and want to see the weird doodles I do when I'm bored. Have a lovely day!!
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alex-leweird · 1 month
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Twitter doodles I forgot to post here 2
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Recent Kroot releases have me huffin copium so hard that something previously unthinkable is possible: an update to THIS absolute unit:
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GREATER KNARLOC TIMES MIGHT BE UPON US!
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titanomancy · 3 months
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[excited squawking]
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cursed-40k-thoughts · 9 months
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Commander Farsight's greatest morale raise was when his tech division modified the standard combat-awarenrss HUD to narrate all the troopers' killstreaks in the HALO announcer voice. The highest one is now 'Greater Good' at 100 kills.
I cannot fully describe how much this amuses me. I am absolutely incorporating this into my T'au worldview, thank you.
Imagine if the Broadsides had high power external speakers wired into them for demoralising enemies. You're a marine in a valley. You're already utterly terrified of very hateful towards the awful xenos gun platforms. Suddenly, a distant crack splits the air. The battle brother to your left is reduced to a fine, red mist. His progenoids are obliterated. A source-less, synthetic voice booms from everywhere and nowhere
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nonplayerchar · 2 months
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First mini of 2024 and first mini of a new army!
This is my first time painting faces, and my first time putting symbols on a mini without just using transfers, and honestly I'm pretty proud of how she turned out! Just gotta finish the base now.
For the Greater Good!
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