Girls Go Slash/Boys Go Bang
57
sat in the small room prayed to his Emperor and God that his
friend hadn’t suffered at his end.11
Moving away from the front line, a number of W40K fan-authors set their
stories in one of the millions of hive-cities in which humans/Terrans live
throughout the universe, using their stories to explore the often violent existence
of life crammed together with up to one billion other souls. In The Note, for
example, Kentigem narrates the story of a member of the Adeptus Arbites (the
Imperial policeforce), who is slowly driven insane after discovering a note at a
murder scene from the victim addressed to him. The note tells him of an ‘evil
conspiracy’ hiding within the hive and provides him with its location: 1118
Vemugenstrasse. At the conclusion of the story, he goes to the named location
with a strike squad and massacres the cultists and daemons that he finds there
only to then regain his sanity and discover that he has in fact killed his own men.
The afterword to the story being told from the perspective of the official who
investigated both the incident and the arbiter’s subsequent suicide.12
Despite this emphasis on innovation, however, there are still limits to both
the topics that the majority of W40K fan-authors explore within their stories, as
well as how far many are prepared to write ‘against the grain’ of the canon. As
‘Richard’ explained;
If you take the 40K universe somewhere completely new, then
its not the 40K universe anymore. It is the world of flying
cathedrals, it is the world of planet-destroying weapons, it is
the world of demons who want to feed on your soul, it is the
world where your only hope of survival is the worship of a
half-dead corpse a million lightyears away. That is the nature
of the 40K universe and if you try to write something that
means that it is not that—that it is a place where there is
forgiveness, respite and something other than war—then its
not 40K anymore, its something else . . . Now that’s not to say
that you cant write stories that go places where the
background has never gone before, but they need to be firmly
embedded within that whole concept of the background
otherwise it would become something else. It wouldn’t be
fanfiction anymore.
Consequently, while, as discussed above, some stories explore the emotional
impact of warfare in the 41st Millennia, these do not, intentionally at least, re
read the canon by, depicting Space Marines experiencing these emotions, for
example. A key feature of their background being that their genetic
enhancements and training result in them no longer feeling any emotions, least
of all fear. Rather, those stories that depict emotional scenes by and large feature
characters drawn from the Imperial Guard who, according to the canon, are not
similarly enhanced and as ‘normal’ humans can experience the full emotional
upheavals of soldiering.