At this point we all kind of roll our eyes at the scroll declaring the Imperium of Man to be the bloodiest and most brutal regime imaginable, if only on account of the fact that the Khmer Rouge managed to be consistently about as bad without the aid of cloning vats.

Few factions in fiction can really lay claim to being consistently more miserable to inhabit than Commoragh. But when people think of the horrors of 40k it's less common to think of the elves than of the Warp. The horrors of 40k are often less about pain than about the affront to human dignity that they represent. The horror of Nurgle is explicitly the horror of someone looking at themselves in a state of impossibly maximized indignity and saying "I'm okay with this." When trying to think of places worse than the entire 40k galaxy I'd focus less on misery and more on dehumanizing indignity.

So, who's worse there?

I'd say the prize for indignity goes to Human Cattle Yapu, by Shozo Numa.

Manga adaptations exist, from prestigious artists, but the novella was recommended by Yukio Mishima himself. It is treated as a serious literary work in academia today.

One reason the Imperium of Man is less horrific than the Empire of a Hundred Suns, is that intelligence and spirit are qualities the British Matriarchy intentionally cultivates in its chattel. Every telepath requires an IQ of 150 to undergo transformation. Every settee is made telepathic in order to respond to its owners summons. That is a kind of horror without parallel in Warhammer. Servitors are lobotomized. There is no human fate in 40k equivalent to Yapu Tunnel Boys. Any Warhammer 40k faction that could possibly show up in the yapu timeline with the goal of exterminating all human life in the galaxy down to the last baby would immediately become the good guys. They would also all unfortunately lose, because the British use precisely controlled time travel, matter reorganization, and emotional control technology at the household level.

>>96012442 (OP)
Okay, OP, I'll bite. You mean like worse as a society, or worse existentially?

>>96012450
I was aiming for what qualities of 40k factions can still inspire revulsion or dread in myself. I personally find 40k is at its "best worst" in the destruction of human dignity at scale as the intended process of particular societies. If there are other dimensions where you think you're meeting 40k where it is strong rather than where it is weak, then that would be appropriate.

>>96012487
To be honest, I'm just more confused as to what you're looking to discuss here. Like, when you say "Galactic civilizations worse than 40k", what do you mean? Like as a whole, or in terms of individual human rights violations? Cause there's an entire series in Japanese children's media that starts with the galaxy conquered by an empire helmed by a literal incarnation of existential suffering and hatred, which eagerly puts children and the elderly to the sword just as easily as it does to any who rebel against it, and whose planetary magistrates are petty dictators who outright abuse the citizens nominally under their rule, forcing them to slave away at machines designed to drain their planets' natural resources until they were nothing but space dust. And they all do this essentially for the mere entertainment and vanity of being able to grind the cosmos into literally nothing with no one to oppose them.

Like, does that make them better or worse than say the Imperium of Mankind? Is it the "maturity level" of a franchise that decides this kind of thing, like whether it's intended for children or adults? Is it the civilization's ultimate goals or methods that should be the focus, or how they individually deliver their cruelties to the common man?

Oh, and more importantly, are we talking about from tabletop game settings, or fiction as a whole?

>>96012442 (OP)
Xeelee easily on both the counts brought up here >>96012450

>>96012442 (OP)
The Interim Coalition of Governance from the Xeelee Sequence is pretty much what the Imperium wishes it could be. The ICOG is so xenophobic that they will gladly sacrifice 30 trillion child soldiers in their rabid attempts to kill so much as a single xeno, and they’re so authoritarian that if you defy them in any way they not only kill you, they go back in time and erase you from history. In fact, even succeeding too well is a sin that they punish, because the ICOG is a death cult that does not accept any heroes to be idolized, so anybody that pulls off something exceptional is also erased from history.

There's not too much point in discussing it as in who's the worst. It's just an arms race towards "everyone suffers the maximum amount forever" and congratulations, you reinvented hell.

>>96012442 (OP)
>I'd say the prize for indignity goes to Human Cattle Yapu, by Shozo Numa.
That's clearly a fetish comic, my friend.
Also among the most basic facts of Mishima is that he was disgusted by himself. He didn't get swole to impress the boys, he got swole to become less like himself. So it's not unnatural for him to be really into body-mod S/M fetish porn.
There are also a buncha obvious postwar nationalist masculinist elements in it that make it vibe harder with people of his generation

>>96012557
>To be honest, I'm just more confused as to what you're looking to discuss here.
Social horror is appealing to me and 40k has a strong dystopian tendency to expand that sense to encompass the stars in the night sky. I would like to identify the limits of that sensibility and see how to instill it in any fiction (tabletop or otherwise) that I might come up with in the future.
So, when you say "as a whole" I think you mean "to everyone on a net level including people outside of the faction." That's not what I mean. I don't feel that kind of horror in tyranids killing guys.
>Like, does that make them better or worse than say the Imperium of Mankind? Is it the "maturity level" of a franchise that decides this kind of thing, like whether it's intended for children or adults? Is it the civilization's ultimate goals or methods that should be the focus, or how they individually deliver their cruelties to the common man?
These are good questions. I'm not sure the field of horror literature and horror criticism have answers for all of them, much less myself. Pinocchio wasn't a horror cartoon but that scene where the boy turned into a donkey left more brain scars that last to this day in more adults than any adult-targeted Dracula movie ever could. I don't think that makes it better horror than Nosferatu, but I don't know if I can explain why. I would privilege adult targeted and explicitly horror material but I don't have a rational explanation for doing so.

I don't think ultimate goals that are far off can make any non-horrific thing into a horrific one. They do seem able to make horror lose potency by being ridiculous or pathetic, which is one of the reasons horror and comedy align but rarely reinforce each other.

>Oh, and more importantly, are we talking about from tabletop game settings, or fiction as a whole?
Fiction as a whole. I loot freely from all corners when I'm in an RPG, and it often seems like GW does likewise when they write lore.

>>96012442 (OP)
Do we need to repost House Plants of Gor here?

Because OP clearly wants to discuss fetish porn material.

>>96012792
If we're going with fiction as a whole, then have you ever heard of the Termight Empire?

>>96012839
Heard of it but not read it. I believe that's a 2000 AD comic with the guys dressed like the KKK that a lot of people say GW took inspiration from. Does it really manage to equal or surpass 40k itself, despite 40k being sort of built to be bigger?

>>96012839
Can't beat the Dune Empire, with its total AI genocide.

>>96012914
To be honest, I have no damn clue if they're worse, I mainly name them because as the inspiration for the Imperium of Mankind, most of its evils aren't quite as grandiose but they sure feel far more motivated by an even more churlish sense of xenophobia and spite for the alien, the mutant, and the heretic than even the Imperium has achieved. Especially since Torquemada is literally one of the most evil human beings in the entirety of history, being the reincarnation of its worst elements from the original Torquemada to John Chivington to Hitler himself.

Like how Torquemada outright discovered time travel and found that future humanity had become a psychic gestalt primordial soup that lived in perfect harmony with itself...and he was so beyond disgusted that humans would ever become peace loving hippies that he outright disowned them as humanity's inheritors, built a power plant in the future, secondarily to power their modern day war machines but primarily to actively spite their own progeny for daring to give up their hatred. Which resulted in the resulting psychic chopped up remnants of the suffering future humanity to form a daemonic entity called the Monad, specifically created to avenge itself on Torquemada and humanity.

And he outright laughs it off as just another example of himself being right about how evil and vile everyone is, actively dismissing that everything that happened is his fault, and even implying that the real reason why aliens at large hate humanity so much isn't because of their nature, but because the Termight Empire just keeps making their own worst enemies again and again not even out of self-preservation but to fulfill Torquemada's sadism.

I don't know if it surpasses 40k by a long shot, but I do consider it more evil in some ways than the equally over-the-top Imperium of Mankind. The latter at least didn't use its children to fuel their tanks.

>>96012925
Probably not, but I always find the Termight Empire still memorable.

>>96012442 (OP)
If your population isn't grateful that you grant them the right to die to random chance again, you only get to sit at the kid's table.

>>96013071
That's just one guy being an asshole and things canonically being completely fine once he's gone though?

Like BioShock Infinite.

>>96013431
That's true but comic books tend to operate on a kind of Great Man idealism where readers understand that a person represents systems, qualities etc. Like Judge Dredd. The specific thing Dredd represents changes but nobody expects him to be a specific psychological character study.

>>96013431
It doesn't just magically make itself fine, though. Torquemada dies several times in the story, and more than once his servants keep trying to keep the flames of hatred alive. Even the portions of the empire that Torquemada leaves well enough alone are still rife with corruption and xenophobia, since the Monad crosses over to another series to try and use a blackhole generator in the Termight Empire to essentially collapse everything into something akin to the Warp and basically infect the universe with humanity's evil. Even at the end of Nemesis when the Termight Empire is officially reformed into Terra, Torquemada's cultists keep hiding out waiting for his return and trying to overthrow the more tolerant leadership. Torquemada himself has to outright be bound to Nemesis and his ship and hurtled through space and time to keep his cruelty in check, cause in a follow up story the exact moment he gets out he almost undoes every reform under the new Terran leadership just with his cult of personality, and it takes another binding to finally be rid of him. Like >>96013504 indicated, Torquemada is similar to the God-Emperor of Mankind in role, but in temperament he represents humanity's capacity for cruelty and spite far better than what you could get in Warhammer 40k, especially when you see that the only person he's ever shown capable of loving besides himself is still just as an extension of his idea of a "pure" marriage.

>>96013688
The future in which he was dead had humanity triggering the Soup Event on itself, which apparently is considered an improvement.

>>96013792
Right. Only to get basically boiled alive to fuel a long-dead empire's war machines. The galaxy would be fine, it's humanity's future generations that're fucked over.

>>96012792
Well, Qu from All Tomorrows are pretty up there. They are completely sure that it is not even their right, no, it their duty to enlighten the unwashed masses and bend them into more aesthetically pleasing, to Qu, forms. And everyone who resists them is basically working for Satan, though they don't believe in any such things since they are Q and thus perfect and divine on their own.

They spend a couple million years on that shit before they find humanity, they absolutely fuck humanity over, do their eldritch tea parties over their broken bodies and after a longer time than Imperium exists in 40k they fuck off to continue their "crusade for beauty" for a couple million years more. Until finally descendants of multiple species, that they fucked over, catch up to them.

>>96014230
They did it for the memes.