In The Grim Darkness of the Future There is Only…. Learning?
April 30, 2019 Uncategorized 4 comments bfoxe19
There have been many things in my life that have captivated me but none more so than Warhammer. When I was six I found a game called Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. I still remember to this day launching the game for the first time on my laptop and seeing the opening cinematic begin to play. Watching these humans in futuristic armor taking cover behind a wall while screaming into a radio about fire support while a horde of green aliens rush across a battlefield towards them. At the time I may not have known what was happening, but I loved every second of it.
Fast forward to 2015, I’m looking in my basement for a game from my game shelf when I find my old box of Dawn of War. I decided that I should try to reinstall it on my desktop and see if it works and to see how good the game that I remember so fondly actually was. So I bring it upstairs and put the cd into the disk drive and get to work with installing it and to my surprise nothing went wrong, it installed perfectly fine. And there it was again, that intro cinematic in its full glory and I had one thought at the time “I shouldn’t have been playing this when I was six.” After playing through the entire game in one sitting I was shocked that the game was just as fun as I remembered it. After this, I thought to “myself is there more of this? And if so where can I find it.” then a few google searches later began the Warhammer binge.
Soon, I had found out that there was an entire fictional universe for Warhammer and Dawn of War was only a small portion of that universe. Then, I began looking on youtube and found a few creators on youtube who explained and explored the lore of the Warhammer universe. I found five channels that I stuck with which where One Mind Syndicate, 40k Theories, Bruva Alfabusa, Arch Warhammer and Commissar Gamza. Soon after I figured out that those humans in futuristic armor were space marines, genetically modified human super soldiers who owed allegiance to the Emperor of Mankind. And those green aliens were Orks an alien race that lives for fighting. Then soon after I began learning more and more about the major races and factions of warhammer these being the Imperium of Man, Eldar, Tau, Chaos, Necrons, Orks and Tyranids. The Imperium of man is mankind united under the Emperor of Mankind whose goal is to conquer the universe for mankind. The Eldar are magic space elves who are dead set on stopping Chaos and the Necrons. The Tau is a new race of aliens who tend to be peaceful and nomadic compared to the other races. The Necrons are space robot zombies who have no other goal, then to wipe out everything in the universe. The Orks are a race of aliens who are not very intelligent and are warmongers whose only goal is to have the biggest shooty stick and to get to the next fight. The Tyranids are a species of aliens that are a hivemind with one goal which is to pick entire planets clean of all their biomass in order to expand the hive of aliens. Lastly, there is Chaos which is a little different than the other races. Chaos consists of various humans and intelligent races who have been corrupted and have pledged loyalty to one of the four chaos gods. These four chaos gods are Khorne the god of war, Tzeentch the god of knowledge, Nurgle the god of decay and Slaanesh the god of pleasure. Those that follow these gods are seen as heretics and generally very bad people as their usual goals are to summon as many demons onto a planet as possible. Along with learning more in general about the Warhammer universe, I realized that there are many different book series based on Warhammer and have since started a series called the Horus Heresy series which has 42 books in it.
I believe that Yeats’ quote “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.” is very accurate. I think this is accurate because we’ve all had those times where we had to learn something but you just weren’t into it because it didn’t interest you and it was a slog to actually go through all of the steps. Whereas if you are interested in something it becomes a lot easier to learn about because you are actually motivated to do so. This principle goes for almost everything even writing this essay, which was very easy to write because it was about something that I’m actually interested in which made the whole process easier.
Photo by MJ Symansky on Foter.com / CC BY-SA
4 Comments
I have had many similar experiences when it comes to things such as video games and movies. These topics that interest us are the easiest to become completely inundated by the desire to learn more about these topics. Your story reminds me of the first time that I saw a superhero movie when I was younger. This movie was Spider-Man, after seeing this movie it led me to have a passion for these types of movies, comic books and even video games.
The first game I remember is a old resident evil game and I loved the first part until the jump scare that happened in the game with nearly made me piss myself. But I have always wanted to go back and give the game a try now that I’m older and can probably handle and understand whats happening.
I personally really enjoyed how this was written mainly because I’ve known you forever and have heard of you talking about this game, you even had me buy it once, but I could never get into it fully. I think it can be attributed to this writing that I am now able to grasp some of it in concept but also what it means to you.
I think it’s funny you, of course, picked to write about this. I am happy that the universe of the books has always enveloped you because it was something I always enjoyed as well. Therefore, thank you for liking the series and allowing it to excite you so we can talk about it.