Extra Credits - leftie gaming channel that had two of its members accused of "misconduct" in only 2 months

[Mnutu]

Not super familiar with 40k, but isn’t even calling Humanity “good” a huge stretch? I mean, we’re talking about a group that ritually sacrifices thousands if not millions of psykers a day just to keep the Emperor alive, whose main military approach is to send wave after wave of guardsmen until the enemy is dead or the Space Marines show up, employing officers whose sole purpose is to execute any guardsmen that so much as looks back, and if the Space Marines fail, their fall back is to glass the entire planet. That’s not a good guy faction, no matter how many Roboute Guillimans you have running around. It’s a terrible example to use. Isn’t part of the appeal that there isn’t a “good guy”, everyone is on board for the grim darkness and ultra violence? Humans are only the default because we are human.

 

[LurkTrawl]

Not super familiar with 40k, but isn’t even calling Humanity “good” a huge stretch? I mean, we’re talking about a group that ritually sacrifices thousands if not millions of psykers a day just to keep the Emperor alive, whose main military approach is to send wave after wave of guardsmen until the enemy is dead or the Space Marines show up, employing officers whose sole purpose is to execute any guardsmen that so much as looks back, and if the Space Marines fail, their fall back is to glass the entire planet. That’s not a good guy faction, no matter how many Roboute Guillimans you have running around. It’s a terrible example to use. Isn’t part of the appeal that there isn’t a “good guy”, everyone is on board for the grim darkness and ultra violence? Humans are only the default because we are human.

Rowboat Girlyman aside, you're sort of half-correct. It's less that they're not "good" and more that it's a system that's viewed somewhat accurately as the only way to keep all of humanity that's united under the Empire alive. It's more like a "in service to the greater good, we must commit smaller evils" kind of situation.

And as far as I know, the psykers aren't sacrificed to keep the emprah alive, they're sacrificed to keep the entire network of faster-than-light travel working, since the guy who used to be able to keep that working is currently slowly dying on a giant golden shitter. The reason the guardsmen are more or less thrown into the thresher as a means of defense is twofold, there are trillions of humans in galactic space and each planet gives a tithe of sorts to the empire in the form of humans for the imperium and whatever goods they produce. The second is that, surprisingly enough, they actually do have some equipment, that with the right tactics/usage and in tandem with the imperial "navy" (it's more like a space force but whatever) can actually overcome a suprising amount of crap without the aid of the Astartes.

So, tl;dr: they're about as "good" as you're going to get seeing as the others are all incredibly worse options, including the Tau collective who only seem benevolent on the surface level. But to say that orks in 40k have anything to do with blacks is not only hilarious for the obvious racism, but it's stupid as fuck when there's an entire fucking Astartes chapter of black dudes. On top of that as someone else pointed out, they're based on the stereotypical british "chav", complete with their manner of speaking being painfully, obviously british.

 

[Intelligent Calcium]

 

[Things Better Forgotten]

Jesus they're still stupid. The fun of 40k is that all the factions are terrible people. Its not like the space marines are unknowingly massacreeing the peaceful villagers of Water's Edge.

 

[KanaPostsonKiwi]

I only watch extra history. Their gaming shit is so bad.

Oh Jesus Christ don't. They are revisionists at best, liars at worst. There are far better channels for that, like History Buffs who don't have a political agenda to twist everything into their worldview. EC has gone on record to argue that slavery is something huwhite people did to black people and that's it, and a lot of people believe that's the case. If anything, brits were the one to put a stop to it after they got really quite good at it.

Extra Credits are still around? I thought they were killed in zanzibar
For real tho, is anyone still watching this faggots? other than hate watching that is

Is that a motherfucking Joel Joel reference?

Anyway, these kind of people have connections, and that's why they persist. Femfreq for instance is utterly completely dead and irrelevant, with some hideous obviously male tranny and a "black rights activist" now co-hosting it, but they still occasionally turn up in certain "news" coverage as if they were ever relevant to begin with.
Extra Credits will turn out like FemFreq and so many "progressive channels" of their ilk. They will keep very high subscriber numbers (because a lot of their subscribers are paid for subs), but will have few thousand views per video, something that a few random LoL gameplay clips on my youtube channel has broken without me ever advertising them anywhere.

The argument that orcs = black people is hardly new. I think Sargoyim of Akkad did a video on "Blacklantis" somewhen in 2017 that argued against the very same thing, but to anyone who doesn't have their head up their arse realizes they're just hooligans turned up to 11 and made green. They even talk the same fucking way. Also orcs in WH40K are not necessarily evil, they're just warring because other people are warring. Mushroom see, mushroom do. If you want absolutely vile and evil races in Warhammer universe, you really don't need to look further than Skaven or Tau. The latter at least has a propaganda department that makes brainlets believe they're benevolent.

I have to say as a trans sub-saharan paraplegic jewish woman with 7 mental disabilities and 4½ PTSDs, i absolutely love the fact that i'm unironically compared to orcs, a race that is purely evil. My pronouns are she/kel please respect.

 

[Emperor Julian]

Thinking on it the three most popular orcs

Warhammer-asexual football hooligans, not even close

Lord of the rings-industrilalzed monsters with no real culture to even compare to, if anything the closest would be western industrialized superpowers which forces the plebs to toil in squalor for immoral wars leading to twisted dehumanized peoples. the closest you get is a private where he mentions he visualizes orcs as looking like fuck ugly mongolians which was a privite comment not publics assertion. Tolkien despised racism as a side.

Warcraft probably the cloest, Orcs are genrally based on early civilisation aesthetics so could be seen as partially based on a series of differant groups some of which arnt white, theirs some overlaps with earlier justifications of Imperialism rather than racial quackery. But Orcs have been pretty multi faceted and more of a rival state of comparitable strength and culture to humans. which is actually quite an interesting dynamic for such a badly written setting.

When pressed a lot of the more moderates conceed that Orcs arnt a proxy for black people but are more genrally scared that having instrisically evil races in fiction cultuvates irl thoughts along the same line that certain peoples have intrinsic traits. The issue with this is two fold: it's hard to control what people draw or project into any form of fiction so this approach is self defeating second authors cannot really create their art while second guessing if someone might take a 'bad take' from it because that's also self-defeating.

Ultimatly most of these people tend to be awkward dorks who don't really understand the subjects they're approaching beyond their failure to grasp academic concepts engaging with angry nerds who feel personally attacked because some nobody had a bad take and companies are stupid enough to buy the polished turd sjws are selling. It's bassically like watching retards trying to argue over quantum physics and breaking into the lab to settle it.

Its gets even more boring when extra credits deliberatly put out disengenious video's to try and obfuscate the issue.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

James Mendezs Hodes' 40k example failing to support the guest writer's preceding argument makes it all the more puzzling as to why he even picked that example to begin with. Lets go over that particular segment:
View attachment 2053981

So with the foolish notion that it is morally good to play nice with something that just wants you dead, Hodes' argument is that a game's inherently-evil enemies that seek to harm the player no matter what are "blocking the player from further becoming a part of [the game world]." This is to explain why evil races are bad game design. He then brings up 40k to exemplify, but his rationale to cite the game IP as bad design falls apart in a couple of major ways.

First, the 40k novels and RPGs that Hodes broadly mentions are ultimately supplement to the core tabletop wargame, optional reading material for those already well-invested in the hobby and its setting. And even so, I imagine that such hobbyists will usually only read just a small fraction of what Black Library has to offer, focusing on stories that feature the factions they personally collect or otherwise like. For the most part, however, most casual hobbyists will be content with the broad world-building fiction provided by the game rulebooks and codices specific to the factions they collect, otherwise wiki-diving when they want to know more besides. In fact, it is outright unreasonable to expect a hobbyist to have acquired and digested the codex of a faction that is strictly an opponent to him because he doesn't collect it. The typical hobbyist is perfectly fine with the surface-level reason for why his faction would do battle with the other. And with Games Workshop handling the 40k tabletop game and its fiction in this manner for decades, it has long beaten its competitors and even been seeing huge growth over the past half-decade, so how is it an example of bad game design?

Second, from my experience with the expanded 40k fiction relayed by novels and RPGs (about a couple dozen, I'd say), what the writers says about aliens having moral nuance isn't even meaningfully true. The alien factions represented in the tabletop game especially are still all depicted as certain threats to humanity, the galaxy at large being a dark, hostile place with the Imperium of Man being besieged at all sides. Sure, there may be a few one-off examples of aliens that aren't an apparent danger such as the Kinebrach of the Interex as featured in the novel Horus Rising (though their harboring of a Chaos demon weapon in a museum is suspicious), but such aliens are few and incredibly insignificant to the galactic-scale setting and care of the hobbyists.

I was actually wondering why those Necron stories in particular were highlighted in the video since, from what I've heard about them before, they only go to show that the sentient rulers of the Necrons are indeed callously evil. It's news to me, then, that the author Robert Rath is actually on the Extra Credits staff. In light of this information, I think I now understand. I highly doubt that Hodes even meant to highlight any particular 40k stories. Rather, I suspect it was the choice of the video editor to throw up a graphic matching that line in the script, and in being equally ignorant of 40k fiction, he just went with showing works by Rath because the editor knew his coworker has written for Games Workshop. If Rath was ever consulted on this decision, he was probably just happy with the publicity. Twitter queries don't indicate to me that Hodes and Rath are personally acquainted.

For further research into Hodes' familiarity with 40k, I looked into how much he has spoken about it previously, and there doesn't appear to be much. The second part of his 2019 "Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth" article linked to in the Extra Credits video description says this:


He subsequently elaborated a little further on Twitter:


With this being all I could find on his regard towards 40k (other common keywords turn up nothing on his Twitter account), I can only surmise that Hodes is not personally familiar with the game IP, only regurgitating the simple points he heard from others about Orks (they're spore-grown football hooligans) mainly because they're a blatant counterpoint to his general war against fantasy orcs. And as you can see, even though he doesn't have the in-depth knowledge to call their depiction racist (don't tell him about the Snakebite Klan and the Savage Orcs of Warhammer Fantasy), he ultimately thinks Orks are still unacceptable.

So why did Hodes mention 40k at all when it's unfamiliar to him and does a poor job of aiding his argument that evil races are bad game design? My guess is that he was just looking for an means to complain about 40k no matter what, coinciding with his social circle of internet "cultural critics" long having a bone to pick with 40k because they believe it to be harboring "bad fans." Like how they've been tearing down D&D and tabletop RPGs broadly for years over orc racism and other such nonsense, they want to similarly target 40k, and the mention of 40k in this video provides that avenue: evil races are racist -> 40k has evil races -> 40k is racist

Oh so he is sincerely retarded.

Something interesting about the Orks is that they were designed specifically for war. In 40k lore, a species called the Old Ones, masters of bio engineering, were waging a war with a species called the Necrons, a race that traded their cancer-ridden organic bodies for machine ones.

To fight what is essentially a race of Terminators whose bodies can repair themselves in combat, the Old Ones created biological machines in the form of the orks.

Orks are born with instinctual memories in how to fight, rudimentary construction skills, and a lust for battle. They don’t understand the concept of peace; it is just time preparing for the next fight. They reproduce asexually via spores and can consume those spores for food. Some Orks are born with instincts for certain tasks, whether it be medical, mechanic, leadership over ork subspecies, or psychically inclined powers. They all naturally strive for competition and physically grow bigger when they become leaders.

The reason for the Orks being as they are make sense in-universe. They were a ready-made army that could be seeded on a planet and keep attacking their enemies until one side was defeated. If they were ignored, they would grow in size that they would become a threat impossible to ignore. They may appear silly, but they are one of the greatest threats in 40k, and the only reason they haven’t won is because they are more likely waging war on themselves than the rest of the galaxy.

 

[Stalphos Johnson]

/tg/'s take on this:

https://desuarchive.org/tg/thread/78454016/

 

[Water Underground]

Leave it to a pseud consoomer channel like Extra Credits to whine about the need for nuance in fiction while painting history with a broad black-and-white brush. These types of people will seriously cry about the "clean wehrmacht myth" of Eastern front historians not ending every sentence with "and the nazis were bad," while saying that you need to give a sympathetic reason for Orcs to maraud and raid. It's like they can't accept that regular people can be coerced or inspired to do horrible things in the real world, so they have to grapple with the concept in the controlled environment of fiction.

 

[BadGoy1488]

So in their newest hot take, about how everyone who likes fantasy is a meany. The pure irony that this image is the literal first second I find amazing. If someone pointed this out earlier, I apologise, I just watched the video like 10 minutes ago.

Look at her legs...once you see it. Idk, might be stupid but I got a little kick out of it

 

[Deadwaste]

View attachment 2058391
So in their newest hot take, about how everyone who likes fantasy is a meany. The pure irony that this image is the literal first second I find amazing. If someone pointed this out earlier, I apologise, I just watched the video like 10 minutes ago.

Look at her legs...once you see it. Idk, might be stupid but I got a little kick out of it

subliminal messaging

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

So for anyone who remembers this video....

...or watched her Batwoman reviews, JLongbone confirmed she is doing a response video to the “orcs = blacks” video.

 

[Hagfish]

Rowboat Girlyman aside, you're sort of half-correct. It's less that they're not "good" and more that it's a system that's viewed somewhat accurately as the only way to keep all of humanity that's united under the Empire alive. It's more like a "in service to the greater good, we must commit smaller evils" kind of situation.

depends on who is writing.
40k does have a tendency to delve into the grimderp/cringedark with how evil it is, because people forget that this isnt the 90s anymore and the Horus heresy has already tried to elevate 40k above heavy metal album status. This is especially apparent with how shallow many of the cultures are, and how hivecities are basically described as literal hellholes dysfunctional to the point where procreation, nevertheless living by yourself, is impossible.

People work 60 hours a day, 3000 days a week without rest, only to go home to their square drawn in crayon in the hab-block where they live.
They might fall in love with another doughy-eyed zombie and the two might procreate, but oh no, now the entire hab-block is incinerated by a frolicking Inquisitor because the two grey-eyed lovers kissed before they fucked, meaning that they are slaaneshi worshippers.
fuckit, nuke the whole world just to be safe.

i like warhammer 40k, but when it comes to writing the everyday lives of people in the imperium it always ranges from decent to "the Author is high on cocaine".

 

[Emperor Julian]

depends on who is writing.
40k does have a tendency to delve into the grimderp/cringedark with how evil it is, because people forget that this isnt the 90s anymore and the Horus heresy has already tried to elevate 40k above heavy metal album status. This is especially apparent with how shallow many of the cultures are, and how hivecities are basically described as literal hellholes dysfunctional to the point where procreation, nevertheless living by yourself, is impossible.

People work 60 hours a day, 3000 days a week without rest, only to go home to their square drawn in crayon in the hab-block where they live.
They might fall in love with another doughy-eyed zombie and the two might procreate, but oh no, now the entire hab-block is incinerated by a frolicking Inquisitor because the two grey-eyed lovers kissed before they fucked, meaning that they are slaaneshi worshippers.
fuckit, nuke the whole world just to be safe.

i like warhammer 40k, but when it comes to writing the everyday lives of people in the imperium it always ranges from decent to "the Author is high on cocaine".

Some of the better writting makes it clear that the absolute shitshows are the extremes rather than the norm, I've always thought quality of life in the Imperium was 19th century industrial revolution bad or feudal europe bad. Their's also the issue the Imperium is ultimatly crumbling and the shitty standards of living are partly to blame because people resent being made to work in a cross between South Sudan and Resident evil to the point were Chaos looks appealing on the grounds you don't know enough about it to understand its somehow worse.

 

[Hagfish]

Some of the better writting makes it clear that the absolute shitshows are the extremes rather than the norm, I've always thought quality of life in the Imperium was 19th century industrial revolution bad or feudal europe bad. Their's also the issue the Imperium is ultimatly crumbling and the shitty standards of living are partly to blame because people resent being made to work in a cross between South Sudan and Resident evil to the point were Chaos looks appealing on the grounds you don't know enough about it to understand its somehow worse.

I get that to a degree. I just wish it was a lot more definitive rather than offhand remarks about things maybe not being that horrifyingly absurdly cartoonishly horric every now and then by characters right before they incinerate some poor guardsman because he sneezed, which is either heresy, a nurgle plague or heresy. The memes exist for a reason, and that reason happens to be poorly controlled authors going full ham.

This is why the Emperor is such a mishmash of a character. One second he is intelligient and charismatic, the next he is one concussion short of being completely lobotimized (The First Heretic), assuming he doesnt go full fedora anti-theist (Last church). And thats on a good day.
Its to the point where the Emperors-Text-to-speech youtube series has a more consistent portrayal of the emperor, if only because they combined all those traits and created a cynical machavellian douchebag.

Dont get me wrong. i really like warhammer 40k. i've read tons of the lore, played several of the games, read a dozen or so of the horus heresy novels.

But its very difficult to get into a setting where things are either inconsistent, contradictory, retconned or just written poorly at times. Not helped by GW being ran by actual gibbons.

 

[vulgar]

depends on who is writing.
40k does have a tendency to delve into the grimderp/cringedark with how evil it is, because people forget that this isnt the 90s anymore and the Horus heresy has already tried to elevate 40k above heavy metal album status. This is especially apparent with how shallow many of the cultures are, and how hivecities are basically described as literal hellholes dysfunctional to the point where procreation, nevertheless living by yourself, is impossible.

People work 60 hours a day, 3000 days a week without rest, only to go home to their square drawn in crayon in the hab-block where they live.
They might fall in love with another doughy-eyed zombie and the two might procreate, but oh no, now the entire hab-block is incinerated by a frolicking Inquisitor because the two grey-eyed lovers kissed before they fucked, meaning that they are slaaneshi worshippers.
fuckit, nuke the whole world just to be safe.

i like warhammer 40k, but when it comes to writing the everyday lives of people in the imperium it always ranges from decent to "the Author is high on cocaine".

Everyone has their own headcannon when it comes to 40k, you either learn to accept the cringe or get on the pommel horse and do mental gymnastics to rationalize the cringe.

or you’re already cringe so you like the cringe because you’re cringe

cringe

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

40k writing is not very consistent but it seems to me that there are more books that talk about the imperium being mostly alright (if anything more depressing than horrific) for a good chunk of the population (basically our world), and we only remember the extremes because that's more memorable.

Anyways back on point, the faggot argument of "no evil races" is most harmful because it basically makes everyone "human" (which is the main goal of modern dnd, like the rule that races don't need to be themselves). It just makes everyone be on the same playing field and causes dnd to be a glorified furry simulator. The idea of an evil race being merely understood is not revolutionary in any way and makes me want to

 

[KanaPostsonKiwi]

Anyways back on point, the faggot argument of "no evil races" is most harmful because it basically makes everyone "human" (which is the main goal of modern dnd, like the rule that races don't need to be themselves). It just makes everyone be on the same playing field and causes dnd to be a glorified furry simulator.

If only, at least many furries would roleplay their character in some fashion related to the race and background. Current DnD makes it so that the race pick doesn't matter whatsoever apart from a smattering of stat buffs and rarely skills, so a human, an elf, a drow and an yuan-ti just act in the same fashion and can form a cohesive party.

It's quite an amusing contrast when they're also virtue signaling at the same time on how much someone's skin color matters in the real world. They're not even a different fucking race, and that still somehow matters.

 

[Emperor Julian]

I mean it's not even true, some races that are pure evil or nature nudges towards hostility are really fun or interesting the ithilid or Obyrith, Nephandi, Skaven, Dark judges, Daleks the list goes on. Thematically their god awful nature makes for great stories.

EDIT-I've also noticed they go for Orcs who are genrally human enough to project onto, You don't really get this issue raised when the entity in question is the stuff of nightmares.

The guy on the left really loves his kids

 

[Hagfish]

Thats why dwarves are great. They are short, angry and bearded. Everyone plays them roughly on the same archetypal spectrum.
A boomer runesmith? A xenophobic miner turned soldier? Lawful tismo plated cleric? Jovial brew-mistress?

Really the issue is that its very hard to create a culture that would fit that many personalities onto it without people having to make up their own shit to feel vaguely unique. Doesnt help that roughly half the evil races are basically set up in such a way that making a character who isnt straight up evil pretty much mandates you stray away from said evil as far as you can.

Dwarves drink Ale, carve runes, they live in the mountains where they sing songs about digging holes. They dislike goblins and elves alike. They fight with axes and wear thick armors. Excellent blacksmiths and builders whos love for the fires of industry is bordering on fanatical.
Contrast that with Orcs as a sort of generic fantasy race.
Outside of Warcraft i really cant think of any sort of strong cohesive and generally "unique" orcish set of cultures. They're moreso just an embodiment of destruction. the "warrior race" exemplified. Their defining characteristics more about how and where they fight rather than what they believe in, what they do, what are their holidays etc.

-Elder scrolls orcs are blacksmiths. they live in strongholds and they fight a lot. they worship a poop war good. Their lore is roughly a paragraph long.
-Warhammer orcs are just violent thugs more or less, with most interesting things about them happening around them or as a result of them. This does make them unique, but less so as characters and moreso as a force of nature.
-Lotr Orcs are just evil. Some differences between the sub-species but its mostly about how strong they are.
-Homm (Ubisoft) orcs were tethering on becoming well defined, but just wound up becoming a sort of absurd romantization harping on the noble savage concept. being all over the place.
"they hate slavery and love freedom. also they use bloodletting from their slaves to use magic".

Elves have the opposite problem sort of, where rather than be poorly defined baddies by narrative nessecity they are instead holier-than-thou douchebags who tend to often be generalized as "aloof assholes who look down on everyone", despite being responsible for things being bad in the first place most of the time. This despite having generally well-defined cultures despite overarching similiarities. People rarely play elves with their race as a core personality trait because they have a tendency to be so reprehensibly disliked as a people.
The only fantasy fictions where i havent felt an intense urge to strangle knife-ears has been Elder scrolls where they tend to be very "human" with really weird cultures and interesting lore. As well as Warcraft because Elves actually have solid motivations and understandable level of xenophobia and dismissive attitudes. especially in the case of night elves, who also managed to be a strong "amazonian" nature faction without going full feminist eco-warrior.

But thats enough of my autistic race rant.