The other women of Chaos

Zak S wrote a good article about gender representations in Warhammer (and fantasy in general). Short version - it's not a problem that Slaanesh's female followers are all seminude pink punk succubi, it is a problem that Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch haven't employed women. So here's some more Chaos.

Tzeentch
The fates. A coven of sorceresses. A mother, a maiden, a crone. A single eye shared between them that sees the strands of fate. Iron shears that sever the ties of destiny. Iron needles to pin prophecies into souls. A loom of air, vast as a castle, across which they crawl spiderlike and work, twist, weave. One knows, one cuts, one binds.

The twisting one. Appears as a little old woman carrying some great load on her back. A peddlar or a refugee. Always on a road between cities. She is like a snail - she is part of the pack, curls up inside it. She keeps the memories and secrets of the people she has devoured in it and treasures them all. She can be traded with but she is impatient.

The Canny women. Knowledge is male or female. The Canny women preserve all that is of woman and not of man. For this they are persecuted. Those who fear for their lives Tzeentch will not listen to. But those who fear for their secret cunning, for the death of women's lore, these Tzeentch will answer even to the witch hunter's pyre. Carried aloft on a column of smoke and goose feathers. Turned to hunt out secrets and unmake the works of men.

Nurgle
Typhoid Mary. Rot all through her but on the outside fine, healthy. A smooth appleskin over puffed, waspblown flesh. Nurgle spared her death and gave her the gift of skintaking - she dresses in the finest. Carries a flenser's blade. Spreads the blight where she walks. Quiet as cholera, persistent as consumption. She has lived many lifetimes.

Plague mothers. What would a mother not risk to save her child? Nurgle speaks, warm as rot, close as the rattle on your lungs. 'Little one, she need not die, though I love her so dearly. Little angel of mine, she may stay with you yet, if you do this little thing I ask.' The plague mothers accept Nurgle to their heart. Milk of pus flows from their breasts. Poison brews in their wombs. They birth contagion. Their infants sick, but not fading. Strong with sickness. They will be his tallymen.

Bile Queens. Whore and Madonna alike curse man's name when they are impregnated with poison, cursed to rot for mankind's incontinence. Some, brimful of rage do not accept their fate. Come to an old wise one who knows they cannot have their health but they can have their vengeance. A rite, an offering, they open up - a portal of flesh - they channel bile, sputum, sickness, wet decay. A vengeance upon mankind.

Khorne
Cult of the Bacchae. Men rule the world, and women must carve a piece of it or fall into madness. The Bacchae carve it of men's flesh. They meet in secret, share knowledge forbidden of blades and democracy and contraception. Wear false beards and trousers. On the chosen night they claim the city as their own. Any man then is game, their flesh to claim and carve and consume.

Mirror harridans. Go into battle naked except for a disc of polished brass over their heart, their skins daubed in blood signs of Khorne's favour. When they are cut to bleed the wound opens also on their foe's flesh. To fight them openly is suicide. Poison, strangling, drowning, starvation. Or wash them clean of blood before you lay a finger on them. Otherwise best first to dig your grave and fight standing in it.

Valkyries. Chosen of Khorne. Their steeds' hooves of thunderous fire and brass trampling the clouds, sulphur trails in the air. Wield axes, wear armour of runecarved brass. Headtakers and skull splitters. They return once the battle is won and claim the skulls of the worthy fallen to add to their master's throne.

The urban nomad

This is how the modern dad blogs. Baby asleep in gruffalo costume draped over one arm in the pose of a Victorian suicide, scrumping WiFi from a cafe. I've spent £2.20 on a latte and I'm downloading about 5gb of audio books. Sorry, cafe in Acomb. Hope you're on unlimited.

Riding the nostalgia train from Warhammer World I bought a copy of Warhammer Visions. With its glossy centrefolds and tiny text boxes rendered in four different languages, the parallels with a European pornomag are pretty clear. The 'Readers models' section further accentuates this. After about ten minutes I realised that, as the baby does not understand anything she sees but does like bright colours, I could 'read' Warhammer Visions to her by describing the pictures.

'Look, darling. That's Archaon the Everchosen, riding a chimeric steed imbued with the power of three of the chaos Gods. Can you count the heads? There's the hellbull head of Khorne, and the head with the feathers is Tzeentchian. And the green frog thing head is Nurgle. Can you say Nurgle?'

She can't say Nurgle, though it would be a good way to literate some of the noises her tiny arse makes. Despite being a creature the size of a housecat she shits like a dump truck unloading five tonnes of hardcore.

When I explained the new picture book in the house to Broodmate she surprised me by being delighted by a photograph of The Glottkin.

'It's beautiful!'

I had to check if she was being serious. The Glottkin is a giant, ambulatory, diseased nutsack covered in spines and mouths.

'Yes I'm serious. Look at it! It's even got tiny skulls coming out of it.'

Here's hoping the bab has her mother's taste.

Battlemallet Planet

We’ve not finished moving house and this last weekend called for a trip to the Midlands to collect things. You can do this all on the M1, but I decided that was for wusses who are also wimps, so I took the A1, got lost and ended up in Nottingham. No big pain – I went to Warhammer World. Think of it as a tiny museum that is 90% gift-shop, 100% Warhammer.

There’s an exhibition. £7.50 for five rooms. For a lifer like me – nose pressed against the Games Workshop window in Colchester aged six – that’s incredible value for money. It’s a mixture of miniatures and dioramas. Big dioramas.

I’ve not taken photographs. Partly my temperament, partly because other people have done it, partly because it’s like dancing about architecture. The point of a diorama – of any sculpture – is its three-dimensional solidness and the implication of frozen time and intercepted movement. Photographs are cool – sometimes really cool – but the real things are sublime. I was reeling, howling, giggling. Literally dumbfounded. The largest diorama is 20’ x 10’ and two storeys tall, made with easily £50,000 of toy soldiers. Patrick Stuart's articles on the aesthetics of toy mans are top reading – treat them as a lecture series, take a trip to the Warhammer World exhibition space as primary reading for your end of term essay.

The macro diorama is viewed from a balcony stairway that goes around the outside of the exhibition space. You enter on the higher storey to divinely survey a battlefield of immense proportions. This is the right place to start you – that cinematic, scenic vastness can only be experienced once and any prior exposure to the diorama would diminish the impact. But this confounds the dramatic tempo of the piece, because you then encounter the most significant conflict – between this guy and this thing – at the very highest spire of the diorama, very early into your exploration. Atop the highest spire is the dramatically correct place for their conflict to take place, but as you descend and circle the piece you are guaranteed not to encounter any single event as dramatically significant again.

With that said, the macro-diorama (and others, one depicting an underground conflict between ratmen and dwarfs, another a mountaintop battle between space Vikings and bugs) makes excellent use of verticality and terrain features that obscure sight-lines to create sub-scenes: what is the background to one area becomes the foreground in another. It invites a three-dimensional exploration, revealing an extended moment. The simple semiotics of warfare makes the interrelatedness of these scenes and the possible consequences of different moments immediately apparent (a Genestealer crawling from a vent while the ground-crew of a Thunderhawk make final flight preparations: dwarf miners with candle-topped hats emerge into a chamber filled with Skaven broodmothers.) Inevitably this puts me in mind of the sublime level design of Dark Souls, multi-tiered, infolding, nautilus-like, secretive, though some older games – Shadow of the Colossus, Prince of Persia– have the same tease and reveal visual journey, the same solid understanding of 3d space. Or Romantic landscape architecture, where gentle undulations of the land would reveal and obscure different features of the grounds as visitors 

walked towards a country manor.

Before the first exhibition room proper are a few cases of history. The first models cast by Citadel, the first Warhammer rules set. Ancient dioramas that were used in White Dwarfs of old, a time when entire universes were defined by the whims of hairy Midlanders. They are miniscule in comparison, expressionistic – a single scene, the moment of crisis. Undead breach the dwarf fortress gates. Elves ride forth from the woods to slay the lichmaster. Sanguinius lies broken, the Warmaster leers, the Emperor ascends to destroy him. That scene is less than a cubic foot. The seed within a crystal forest.

Aged seven, I press my nose up against the window of Games Workshop. There are two dragons, one white, ridden by an Elf lord, another Green, ridden by a goblin shaman. The goblin dragon has purple warts.

Aged eight, my birthday, a card from my parents. The illustration is the box art from Titan Legions: an Emperor Titan makes war against an Ork Mega Gargant while armies of millions clash in the ruins of a city larger than is possible. Inside is a gift voucher for Games Workshop – just enough for a box set. I buy the Warhammer 40,000 2^nd edition box set. The cover art is by John Blanche – a red and yellow armoured Blood Angel brandishes a primary blue power fist and a boltgun against hordes of onrushing Orks. He doesn’t meet our gaze – he’s looking for things to kill. Inside are twenty Space Marines, twenty Orks, forty Gretchin, a cardboard Ork dreadnaught. I grasp the rules, though I hardly play with them. The books, referencing twelve sided dice and Electoo monks and John Blanche Gothicism are portals.

Aged eleven my mother dies and, without understanding that I’m doing it, I focus myself on things that I can control – homework, computer games, learning a future history that has never existed. There’s no internet yet, really. There’s White Dwarf and conversations with friends, and over-excitement in the store with the elder-statesmen employees, venerable at the age of eighteen.

Recently my father returned a selection of my possessions long since forgotten in his house. This included that eighth birthday card. Now I can see how crude and ridiculous the fighting machines are: the phallic plasma cannon of the Emperor Titan, the distorted perspective that means the warring armies are discharging their weapons over the viewer’s left and right shoulder rather than at each other. I’ve framed it, and it will go up somewhere in the new house.

I live! I die! I live again!

This is a post about having a child.

In some ways the baby is like a drug. I am addicted to her. The high when she smiles, or coos, or gurgles, or looks surprised, or does something new (no matter how trivial, banal, or derpy) is just magnificent. It's a rich, mellow high, like a great wine, a Christmas dinner, seeing a friend after a year apart and picking up where you left off. It's a high you feel good about enjoying. The crash, of course, is brutal. I don't know why the NHS doesn't just automatically diagnose all new parents with postnatal depression: even if you have naturally robust neurochemistry and a cheery demeanour, the combined assault of sensory abuse and sleep deprivation will shatter you. Then there are the other similarities between a child and drug abuse. You stop seeing your friends. You stop taking care of your other needs, like washing yourself or getting dressed. All your money and energy goes into feeding your habit.

Then there are the ways that having a baby is cosmically weird. This entity, which wears a human face but bears no resemblance to any human I have interacted with, wriggles and writhes and gurgles with an animal sentience. My relationship to her is profoundly strange. Sometimes she is an abusive, bipolar partner, alternately granting me affection and then horrible, nerve-shattering emotional abuse. Most of the time she is like a patient, and a prisoner, and my beloved. Basically she's like the writer from Misery. I am Nurse Wilkes. (Now it is I who is the metaphor for heroine). Eventually my baby will stuff a burning manuscript in my mouth and beat me to death with a typewriter. Teenagers, amiright?

Can I recommend having a child? Honestly, no. No. All the things that come with having a child - you're not ready for them. You would hate them. The loss of freedom and the vertical escalation of responsibility is not something you are ready for. It will unmake you. It will dissolve all your certainties and grind your life into paste. It will kill you. It will resurrect you. Rebuild you out of your splintered remains. The new you will be happy. It doesn't matter if the new you is more or less happy than the old you - the old you is dead, dust in the wind. They cannot be compared.

If you think that you are ready to have children, you're wrong. You're no more ready to have children than you are to be dead - because after death and children, you no longer exist. Something new does, that thinks it is you.

I enjoy the memories of the thing that I was. And I love my baby. I'm getting used to the person I am now. It's all a bit much.

We saw Star Wars

*Here be spoilers*

Seeing films in the cinema is more complicated now. The baby is not the best moviegoing accessory, prone as she is to shrieking like her legs are being sawn off, and projectile vomiting (a good three foot range.) We deposited her on the grandparents, and she spent the duration of the movie happily asleep, lashed to her grandfather.

My thoughts having seen it:

Episode VII is like drinking a pint of Speckled Hen after lent -  it doesn't matter that it's a thoroughly average example of the form, it's exactly what was missing, so it feels brilliant. The best and worst I can say for the film is that "it does the job." It's a workmanlike retread of Star Wars tropes, the Hero's journey, magic samurai and World War 2 dogfighting. Turns out that's enough.

It's a kid's film. The morality is black and white (with the concept that a person can change from one side to the other, rather than exist in a grey area), it runs on narrative causality, and the geopolitics are at the level of complexity a Trump voter could understand. That's all great. The last time a Star Wars movie had believable geopolitics it was a right dog's arse. Space fairytales are rad.

JJ Abrams style is more readable than I thought. +Zak Smith had a good discussion thread that identified some of the signs - travel is so easy and communication so fast that space is functionally very small, and locating a person is only ever a matter of knowing where they are, not undertaking a journey to get to them. (I wonder - is that something an iPad and Satnav child would even notice?) I don't think Abrams is good at incidental texture either - while the plot clips along at a fantastic rate and much more happens than in any of the original trilogy movies, the incidental and often banal details of the OT (things like briefing scenes given by unnamed military personnel, the many different technicians failing to repair the Millenium Falcon in Empire, the multi-stage ritual of entering Jabba's palace) act as narrative greebling, suggesting a scale to events that extends outside the bounds of the movie. Abrams manages it for Rey, but fluffs it completely with the Resistance and the New Order.

Kylo Ren is really beautifully portrayed. Top scenes - removing his helmet, and trying to pray the lightside away. He reminded me of Malfoy trying to be the man who can kill Dumbledore in Half Blood Prince. Hotvader is definitely in. The concept that being bad is also a lot of mental effort, that people are naturally inclined against, is a very nice one to see added to the lexicon of villainy.

Starkiller Base is nowhere near as cool as Death Star. Dieter Rams would hate Starkiller Base.

I think that's the extent of my original or semi-original thoughts.

Children are Lovecraftian

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they enter the universe from outside it. They are an imposition of existence out of nothingness that was not and now is. I existed for twenty-seven years before my daughter was part of the universe. She will never, truly, comprehend that, because her universe began to exist only when she was born.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they manifest themselves within the flesh of an adult human and wrench their way bodily into the material plane in a nightmare day-long ritual of pain and gore. Have you even seen afterbirth? Google it. Tadah! Now you know how Shoggoths look. (Or DnD Black Puddings).

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are (at least to begin with) a profoundly abstract consciousness, a minimal, machinelike, binary dot of need or satiation. They comprehend nothing and experience everything in ways that adults have forgotten.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are vampires. Fucking vampires. They feed on your energy and love and use mindrays (and oxytocin) to enslave you. I am a ghoul now. I am a sleepless thing eating bugs and worms. I exist to serve the beast.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are a physical manifestation of deep time, and the knowledge you will be superceded and forgotten, and only through mimicry and memetic transfer can you hope to raise feeble dams against the onslaught of entropy that will drown the fortresses of man.

We took the "Make more meeples" action

Eleven months ago, on the train to Manchester, my girlfriend called me and told me she was pregnant. This was unexpected. I was travelling to Manchester for a two-day training workshop on public sector commissioning protocols as they applied to arts organisations, and to meet with a Mancunian theatre with a particularly excellent approach to youth engagement, and for another meeting with an artist-led company with a great reputation for participatory arts practise, and then a daylong meetup of the This +5 Sceptered Isle OSR community. I was not prepared to hear about our fecundity. I skipped out on the OSR meetup. Then (if you've done the maths you'll be way ahead on this one) about two months ago we had a baby.

I say "we". My girlfriend did most of the work. The terrifying, mind-shattering work. I'm surprised that more of the bible isn't about childbirth. Or the Iliad. Literature in general. The canon. Anyway, two weeks postpartum, as if to prove that she is a mad hard bastard who could put a Glaswegian longshoreman into a coma with just her outgoing personality, my girlfriend applied for and got her dream job. Now we're moving to York.

We have a baby, who I alternate between calling Bugglesnuff and Professor Wiggles, and we're moving to York, and I'm going to be a stay-at-home dad. It's all a bit new. All a bit... original. I suspect I might have a thing to write about.