Who Could Not See This Miniature Naming Drama in /r/sigmarxism?

I'm sure that the lads from the Midlands that created this property in the middle of the 80s at no point considered naming a brutish Ork warlord after Margaret Thatcher. The nickname of 'The Iron Ork' is, of course, also entirely coincidental.

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Press X to doubt.

You people. You just call anything you don't like a Nazi. Let me take a wild guess, I bet you think Warlord Schmadolf Schmitler is based on a Nazi too right?

It's not that clear-cut. Heinrich Kemmler, or the Lichemaster, is a vile necromancer who has amassed the second-largest library of forbidden lore in the setting. He may be named after Heinrich Himmler (a Nazi politician known to be an amateur occultist) or, alternatively, Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, the best known treatise on witchcraft.

Or - and this is the most likely explanation - Games Workshop, a company never known for complexity or subtlety in naming things, literally just picked a name that sounded unique, vaguely sinister, and plausible for the setting.

Case in point: their most popular product, the Space Marines, are officially called the "Adeptus Astartes." Was GW's choice of that name for their exclusively male superhuman warrior-monks intended as a reference to the Canaanite sex goddess? Probably not.

I wonder how many of the deniers have said "HeinrichKemmler" out loud while considering the question?

Never really imagined this Monty Python sketch to be relevant.

You're right. People can just be so fucking stupid that they can't see obvious parallels. Especially the warhammer fanbase who need to be explicitly told things otherwise their tiny subhuman brains would melt from trying to detect subtlety.. as we see here.

Could be a mix of Heinrich Kramer and Himmler?

His sole redeeming factor is opposing Arkhan, because Arkhans master is Nagash and… fucking everyone hates Nagash

Me sitting here with bonereapers

Why not both?

Okay but say out loud:

• HeinrichKramer

• HeinrichKemmler

• Henreich Himmler

Do a few times for fun and let us know if your thoughts on the matter change at all or if you've stayed the course. :)

I’m really confused here, do you mean the Nazi reign, or do you mean the 2nd worldwar?

Maybe both? Because Nazi reign began 1933 and the war on 01.09.1939

Btw this is not calling you stupid, I was just confused when reading 1936, thinking I remeberd the date wrong

This is about Warhammer Fantasy, as it happens. Kemmler, however, is definitely a really bad dude and depicted as such. The witch hunters of Fantasy are generally depicted as bad people even if they are sometimes rooting out Chaos cults. Although there's not a ton of lore around them, IIRC there is at least one instance of a sorcerer turning to Chaos and making the problem way worse because of them.

Then again i've never played Warhammer 40K, but from what i've heard they're almost always portrayed as the bad guys right?

My understanding is every faction is some level of xenophobic, fascist, genocidal or just plain psychotic.

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I think needing to make it very fucking clear the bad guys are evil is why Disney has taken the Empire from obviously the bad guys to just like, cartoony evil that's been destroying planets and genociding since before day one.

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I did say it was a miniature drama. :)

Thank you! :)

The problem is that GW has been ran over the years by about 40 variations of "that kid", usually together. You know. That kid who let you play with his action figures but he'd be the one to make sure his figures would always win.

This makes it very difficult to point at any one single creator for any specific writing element (and nowadays is impossible because GW doesn't even put their EICs on the covers of their books anymore after Matt Ward got a ton of hate mail for certain writing decisions involving the ultrasmurfs that he was considered responsible for -partially due to some really bad answers he gave in interviews-).

It's also resulted in the entire canon of Warhammer being a giant convoluted mess (40k has it admittedly far worse to the point where some executive at some point handwaved the retcons with "everything we write is written as if it were imperium propaganda, take it with a grain of salt") with very few clear inspirations besides the glaringly obvious.

Warhammer fantasy was never quite as bad as 40k until age of sigmar, which is the sequel/soft reboot, which from what I can tell has been riddled with similar messy stuff your find in 40k.

There’s not really one creator you can do that with, there were a couple guys back in the 80s but all of them have subsequently left the company and now the game is managed by committee with probably dozens of different people adding things without talking to each other and whose public announcements about the game have to make sure not to piss of their bosses or the marketing department

People have always been incredibly bad at recognizing satire, just look at Starship Troopers. The film could not possibly be more on the nose and blatant about being a satire but was still panned on release for being supposed fascist propaganda. People to this day think the book is promoting the failed system that it depicts as losing at every turn.