Covid is rough, man. The flu symptoms have passed, but the fatigue is beating the hell out of me. Let’s talk about racism. The Horus Heresy is a science fiction series: based on the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000, it follows a civil war amongst the legions of the Emperor of Mankind. Some fall to chaos and some remain loyal, and they fight. You might know that each of the legions is modelled on a particular trope or archetype. The Space Wolves are modelled on Vikings – they’re all called things like Byrnjolf or Bror Tyrfingr, and their home planet is Fenris. All the legions are like that. The Dark Angels are modelled on Arthurian knights, and Angron’s treacherous World Eaters – well, you know, some legions are built around fatal flaws rather than specific tropes. Especially the traitor legions. Angron is angry. That’s his thing.

Angron’s tale is pretty sad, actually – he was captured and forced into slavery, forced into these gladiator battles on the planet Nuceria. His captors surgically installed cybernetic implants, the Butcher’s Nails, which trigger rage and violence – and they can’t be removed without killing him, even after he’s free. Over time, his cognitive capacity degenerates, and he becomes this uncontrollable slavering killer. You can see the Nails in most depictions of Angron – on the 40K wiki, for instance, they sort of look like dreadlocks coming out of the back of his head. And – wait, hang on. Does the depiction of Angron maybe draw on certain tropes about blackness? Slavery, cyber-dreadlocks, imposing physical form, animalistic rage – some of these seem like references to black history and culture, while others are derived from racist caricatures of black people. Angron isn’t literally a black character, but the Space Wolves aren’t literally from Norway, either – they still draw on the archetype or trope of Vikings. Angron might not literally have black skin, but his character design evokes multiple markers of blackness. As readers, as the audience, we should probably have some questions about how those markers are invoked, and whether his design perpetuates racist caricatures.

There’s an important distinction here between the world of the fiction and the tools used to communicate it – between the lore and the character design, so to speak. Lore in itself isn’t really justification for anything. If you write a story about a brain worm that makes beautiful women want to have sex with you, that’s weird – and you can’t blame it on the brain worm. We can’t refer to the internal logic of the fictional world as justification for real-world creative decisions about what stories we tell or how we tell them. When we draw on these cultural tropes about rage or anger, we have to consider the cultural legacy – where those ideas came from and what they might refer to. This distinction between the fictional world and the tools of communication is subtle, but it’s really important to how we read and critique fiction.

One clear case study of the difference is in Gothic, the common language of the Imperium. In the universe of the Horus Heresy, Gothic is the language of the Imperium. It’s the lingua franca, a shared bridging language. That’s the reality of the fictional world. But the books themselves obviously aren’t written in Gothic – they’re written in English, or later in other languages as they are translated. English is the tool that the writers use to explore the fictional language of Gothic, and its relationship to the other languages of the universe.

We see this exploration manifest in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes non-Gothic words are described by their sound rather than depicted directly. In chapter 16 of Betrayer, the Word Bearer Erebus carries out a ritual: he is described as speaking in a “jagged, alien tongue”. Elsewhere, non-Gothic conversations are flagged as happening in some other language, but are still relayed in English. In Horus Rising, before the war council above the world of Murder, First Captain Abbadon talks to his comrades in Cthonic, the language of the Luna Wolves: “He touched his link, activating the privy channel, and spoke, in Cthonic, to the other three members of the Mournival. ‘War council in thirty minutes. Be ready to play your parts.'” Finally, sometimes characters use words from their home language, which remain untranslated. To communicate this idea of loan words, the writers derive terms from real-world languages other than English. You see this most often with the Space Wolves: as they’re basically Vikings in space, the loan words for their fictional Fenrisian language are derived from German or Old Norse. You find them talking about skjalds and so on.

In each of these three instances, our relationship to Gothic and the other languages of the Heresy is mediated through the English language. Sometimes non-Gothic languages are described as sounds, sometimes they are rendered in English but flagged as non-Gothic, and sometimes certain non-Gothic words are derived from non-English sources. At each step, our understanding of non-Gothic languages is filtered through its relationship to English. English is the core language, the assumed normal, associated with the shared language of Gothic. It’s not surprising, then, that when the writers wanted to depict a group who struggle with Gothic, they reached for stereotypes around people who struggle with English.

The White Scars are a loyalist legion based on Genghis Khan and his cavalry army. They are the only Asian-inspired legion, and they draw on a range of pan-Asian tropes. They have a strong loyalty culture, they are swift like the wind, they all have names like Hibou Khan or Shiban Khan. They also have a poor grasp of Gothic. Because our relationship to Gothic is mediated by English, that difficulty is expressed through stereotypes about Asian difficulties with English. The sentence structure is often slightly disordered, with missing articles or other words. For instance, discussing the Council of Nikaea in Scars, the White Scar Yesugei says “Magnus was figurehead. Most powerful. But he was not only voice.” In the audiobook versions, depending on your narrator, the White Scars receive some pretty strong Asian accents – which are not always in good taste. When I bought the audiobook of Scars in April 2023, the narrator was Jonathan Keeble. I got to listen to this random white man put on an Asian accent to lament his poor language skills: “‘I spoke,’ said Yesugei sadly, remembering. ‘Awkward. It was in Gothic, and so I did not do well.'” They’ve more recently replaced Keeble’s narration with that of Shogo Miyakita, so – you know, at least we don’t have to listen to Keeble’s I. Y. Yunioshi routine any more.

The thing about the Horus Heresy, or the Warhammer 40K universe more broadly, is that it’s a dystopian hellscape. The Imperium is a fascist regime. It’s deeply xenophobic, and locked into a state of total war. And that’s fine, right – it’s totally fine to write a story about terrible people. The problem is that the Imperium being terrible is often used as a dodge for any criticism about the broader storytelling methods. If someone notes that 40K is racist or sexist, the reply is often – well, that’s just the Imperium, and they’re meant to be the bad guys. It’s a defence that confuses the categories of fictional world and storytelling tools. It deflects critique of the tools by reinterpreting it as critique of the world. But – as I hope is abundantly clear, at this stage – there are legitimate problems with the tools. It’s fine to have a fictional world where some people are worse at speaking a particular language. Sure, fine. But when those people are your only Asian legion – yeah, that’s weird. When you’ve got a white narrator putting on an Asian accent and pretending to struggle with his R’s – yeah, that’s fucking weird. The tools used to communicate the White Scars’ difficulty with Gothic are rooted in a long history of racism. They are tools used to tell the story rather than elements of the fictional world, and we can’t hand-wave them away with reference to the Imperium’s xenophobia. Satire isn’t an excuse. Some of this stuff is just racist.