ShakyFt Slasher said:
I have noticed something a little strange just from my surface perception on the 40k universe and I would like to have a question about it answered. I have noticed that ALL citizens of the Imperium of Man have been white European looking fellows. I guess I just find it odd that there is not one black, asian, hispanic, indian man anywhere. Maybe I'm just a Warhammer 40k noob (I did just get into the universe) but is there really only white Europeans inhabiting the Imperium or have I just not looked far enough into the universe?
Lol, you know I was watching some Anime set in the far future and it seemed like just about everyone was Japanese. I think something is wrong here...
In short, the troll is obvious, this kind of thing only becomes an issue when you pick on whites, and it's being done for that reason.
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That said, it's been a while and there is a lot of contridiction about things over the years, but as I remember things way back in the distant pre-history before chaos messed up humanity's warp travel and it was colonizing worlds and such, humanity had itself come out
of a massive war that had almost wrecked earth, a war which pretty much pitted the East against West, with the US pretty much allowing itself to be absorbed into Europe in order
to fight a Pan-asian alliance. This ended with genocides being mentioned, though it never said which peoples were wiped out entirely with any specificness we can probably make some guesses based on the artwork.
A very basic version of what happened from then on was that humanity expanded after this dark age, accidently unleashed chaos (well actually it was the Eldar, but that's not supposed to be widely known) it tainted the warp and travel between systems, and most importantly destroyed FTL communications bringing about a "long night" situation where all of the millions of worlds occupied by humanity lost contact with each other and developed seperatly. Then due to heavy genetic engineering a superman was eventually created who was to other supermen what they were to regular humans, this guy was the emperor who pretty much started to turn the tide against chaos due to innate psychic baddassery before chaos turned another equally powerful superman on him (Horus), they pretty much kill each other, with the Emperor continueing to exist more or less as pure mind with enough lingering power to prevent chaos from totally sweeping everything away, and to allow people to continue to navigate the warp.
There is a lot more to it and a lot of "yeah buts" but that's basically it. The Space Marines were basically humanity's elite warriors who were descended genetically from the fighters who ended the warring on old Earth which is why many of the chapters can trace their lineage back to earth. If 99% of the Space Marines look caucasian, well that's where the gene seed is from, and also who is going to have colonized most of the planets.
I'm not a Warhammer 40k fan, mostly having read some of the books, and played the PnP game a bit (never been much into minatures). I have however been given a crash course in some aspects of the pre-history through the arguements of people who have been FAR more into than I have. Among them arguements about why you wouldn't see a high-tech samurai-themed Space Marine Chapter no matter how "kewl" it would be, just as why with the hatred of Nazis in Europe you'd never see a Nazi-themed one, which seems to be a recurring theme for a lot of people's personal minature armies for some bizzare reason. Basically if there ever were "Super Samurai Marines" they would have been on the other side, and thus died when humanity was united, and certainly never would have continued as a chapter.
Some people might be wanting to say "yeah... but" due to how politically incorrect this all sounds, but really I don't think there was anything paticularly vicious behind it to be honest. I mean when I look at a lot of Anime stuff (even if I'm not a huge anime fan anymore) I'm casually handed backstories where the entire Western World is trivialized or wiped out during the backstory, sometimes due to our own bumbling stupidity... if the creators even bother to try and justify the ethnic breakdown of the far future. Truthfully given the events of World War II, and the current rather unapologetic attitudes of the modern Japanese (which are incredibly racist and based on cultural superiority) that's probably far more disturbing than when you see it in western fiction with a culture that has tried to promote tolerance. I'm more willing to give western writers credit for something intended to be dark, or simply going with a concept, than expressing some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy via backstory.
The point here being that in the end it doesn't matter, and anyone who does care probably has issues they need to sort well beyond Warhammer 40k, or is intentionally trolling. Not being politically correct enough in fantasy is the most ridiculous thing there is.