another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse

there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes

Warhammer’s satirical roots are of a very similar nature to the original run of Judge Dredd (and it was created by writers and artists in the same social circle as the creators of Judge Dredd, in addition to just outright borrowing a ton of things from it - it would not be entirely inaccurate to describe the original version of Warhammer 40K as Lord of the Rings mashed up with Judge Dredd and turned into a space opera): despite the whacky elements the setting used to have its core satire was a bit drier, namely that it crafted this absurd world where enough people thinking bad thoughts could literally cause daemons to appear and eat everyone and aliens really were just comic book villains out to get you, a setting so extreme that it justified the Imperium’s paranoia and iron grip. Effectively it was holding up this excessive, absurd, and contrived universe and saying “this is how stupid things would have to be for these actions to be rational” in much the same way Judge Dredd holds up Dredd himself as an impossibly perfect, selfless, and incorruptible superman as a “look how impossibly dedicated and perfect someone has to be to wield this sort of power, and even there he’s the only one all the other Judges suck and the system is a wreck because it’s stupid and dysfunctional.” It could almost be seen as a sort of satirical Thermian Argument, where half the joke is how ridiculously contrived the justifications have to get to become coherent.

So obviously that gets missed and it becomes a sort of unintentional “Thermian Propaganda” to borrow the term someone else here came up with when I was trying to find a term to describe basically that phenomenon (but intentional) a couple of weeks ago, where the joke is lost and instead you’re left with a set of justifications that make the Imperium’s extremism become coherent and rational in-universe and that get taken seriously by its fans. On top of that is the fact that the Imperium is just steeped in the aesthetics of death and sacrifice and however silly and excessive it is it makes the viewer feel the emotions associated with ideas of doomed last-stands and redemptive violence, and that induced emotion is a key part of intentional Fascist propaganda because Fascism is fundamentally a warrior death-cult that reveres violence and sacrifice for their own sake (or more accurately, this is a cornerstone of Fascism and a key part of how it appeals to its would-be warrior class, because Fascism does have other fundamental attributes and other cornerstones as well).

Meaning if you write a story about the how 112th Death Brigade from Bellum IV covered themselves in pictures of skulls and fought to the last man in a hopeless battle against the space demons of Osteo IX using laser guns and building sized tanks, and their leader Colonel Bonehammer died setting off his own grenade when he was surrounded after getting his chainsaw stuck in a megademon’s head, even if the intent is that this is all very silly and pointless you’re still writing a story about soldiers covered in Fascist iconography dying “glorious” deaths in a battle against monsters and sacrificing themselves in acts of redemptive violence for a greater cause. It’s like the old saying that you can’t make an anti-war movie because even if the point is to showcase pointlessness and horror you’re still making a spectacle of it and making the audience feel things and even if those things are sorrow and anger they’re still consuming the media to feel those things and so despite being negative emotions they still satisfy and please the viewer.

Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity.

Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest.

The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/