Does the AO3 outage, which could potentially last weeks, have you frantic about what to read in bed late into the wee hours of the night? Are you concerned that there is nothing in contemporary fiction that can replicate the same kinds of delicious, heartbreaking angst written by overworked college students for whom English is their second language? Let me offer you a suggestion:
The Warhammer 40,000 novels.
I am being deadly serious.
I get your likely skepticism. From an outsider’s perspective, Warhammer looks like an immature 12-year-old boy’s idea of cool. It’s a bunch of super-fast, super-big, super-strong dudes swinging medieval swords in an era in which power armor and faster-than-light travel exists, with hardly a woman or brown person in sight. Guys are running around with names like Mortarion and Ferrus Manus leading legions called Death Guard and Iron Hands. It sounds like a bunch of Mary Sues on power trips and anyone serious about their fanfiction diet would of course stay far the hell away.
But! If you like to see the tension of loyalty, love, and duty nearly snap a man in half. If you like to see when a man slips the knife of betrayal between the ribs of his beloved brother. If the last stand of doomed men once divided by faction but now united in death gets your blood going. Or if you just like two catty robot bitches thwarting each other’s plots, but occasionally putting rivalry aside to help the other in an hour of need because it’d be boring without them across the millennia…That’s all Warhammer, baby.
I’m only four-and-a-half-books into the Horus Heresy, a story arc that actually takes place 10,000 years before the time in which the table-top and video games are set. In it, Horus, a primarch and the leader of Emperor of Mankind’s 16th Legion of space marines, decides (with the help of demonic corruption) that he’s tired of the Emperor’s shit and gathers a handful of allies (who lead their own legions) to launch a rebellion. But before he can declare open war against the Emperor, he’s gotta get rid of anybody he doesn’t think will go along with his heresy within his and his allies’ legions first.
It’s important to note that primarchs are the genetic sons of the Emperor and that the men under them, the space marines, are the genetic sons of each primarch. So they all think of themselves (loosely) as family. These are brothers, fathers, and sons, and despite their differences they all love each other. Whether or not these relationships are romantic or filial is up to you, and the books are just ambiguous enough that either interpretation is valid. (And if you’re reading through a “fandom” lens, who cares either way!) Those bonds are then beautifully, mercilessly shattered when Horus rebels.
My favorite fanfics involve maximum angst and suffering. I don’t get out of bed for anything less than utter anguish and this Warhammer shit was just out there in the open, waiting for me to pick it up. To be clear, there’s no smut in these books (except the ones that prominently feature Fulgrim) but the tension as brother turns on brother and the consequences thereof are just as gratifying. There’s a moment, in the midst of Horus’ purge, when a man is dying in the arms of a robot powered by the barely living corpse of his legion brother and says, “We’ll go together then, shall we?”
You’d think that’d be a line you’d hear in an angsty SasuNaru dark fic but no, that’s Warhammer, baby! And there are so many moments just like that throughout the series. So run to your nearest Audible or Libby or wherever else you get your books and let Warhammer tide you over until AO3 comes back.
