40K: Players Have Silly Ape Brains
Pimpcron discusses how our dumb human brains limit our creativity.
Hey ya’ll! I just took a break from keying my neighbor’s car to write an article. Don’t worry, it’s justified. [Steal my coupons again, will you]. And while I scratched a phallus in knightly armor fighting a phallic dragon into the driver’s side door, I realized how our humanly biases keep us from being more creative in fiction. If I let my mind wander while I make art, it allows my mind to drift and you get these amazing articles.
Orks Must Be Green
With such a well-known fantasy trope, you get an image stuck in your head. If you see a green-skinned model at first glance, you probably think Ork first. It could be a lizard warrior, algae-kin or plant person, but your first instinct is to shout ‘Ork!” and point. At least mine is. My friend has his Orks painted orange because of some back story he made, and they just don’t look like Orks to me. I’m sad to say, but when it comes to the color of an ork’s skin, most of us are NOT color blind. And in 2017, that has to change.
And Ork Blood Must Be Red
This one really gets me. If you look at the Painboy model for Orks, GW painted him with all kinds of red blood on his smock. But for one, Orks are more plant than mammal. And for two, our skin is different shades of tans and beiges because our body is water-logged with red blood. Their skin would not be green if they had red blood. But every time I see a model with a different color blood on it, I say “Okay, who got into the finger paints?” while I wag a finger at the model. If you aren’t catching it yet, I talk to people’s models a lot. Some people are “dog people” where they’ll come up and ignore the owner, but pet the dog. I’m a “model person”. I’ll walk up to a stranger’s army, ignore the owner and talk to the models.
Blue is Water
My daughter was painting a model and made the base blue. Like a person who assumes things I’m like, “Oh, he’s standing in water” and she’s replies, “No, it’s blue grass”. Obviously it is a safe assumption normally that blue = water. But that’s only based on our Earth-bound biases. If you see a blue, green or even brown river, you can compare that against things you’ve seen and accept it. But if you saw a pink river, you’d think you were fighting in Candy Land. A yellow river seems ridiculous. And it’s this kind of bias that kind of makes me sad because if I saw a movie which really tried hard to sell the idea of a bright pink river, I just couldn’t take it seriously. Like swimming in Pepto Bismol.
Drink just a bit of our river and cure your upset stomach!
Females Must Have Breasts
Here’s a fun fact: do you know why human women have boobs? Because we are mammals and we are meant to feed our babies breast milk. See? They are used for more than just a place to hang your tassels or to hit you in the face while jogging. Mammals are the only type of animal who do this. So why do we assume that Eldar, Tau, or any other species is a Mammal? Now, I’m sure at some point they have covered in the fluff how those races give birth, which I’m assuming is live birth like a Mammal. So maybe those races are Mammals.
But my point is that we are so stuck in our idea of what a humanoid is, that we miss out of some really cool ideas. Then again, sex sells and you want your female models to look sexy to some degree or they will look like guys. Obviously female characters in alien races are designed with the “speed of plot” mentality where you’re just trying to get the point across as fast as possible. I get it. But imagine how many different versions of women we could invent for aliens that would still be attractive but distinctly non-human?
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
See the tips of my ears and slightly strange eyebrows?
Products of billions of years of completely independent evolution far from humans.
Star Trek is notoriously guilty of this trope. All humanoids must have a head up top with two eyes in the center, a nose of some sort, and a mouth beneath it all. Oh, and don’t forget the two arms up top and two legs below. Once again, I understand that budgets get in the way with a TV show, and you have to use human actors. But when making models for a wargame like 40k, you could let your imagination run wild.
Oh, Tau have a *very* few changes like a lack of a nose, and hooves for feet. But come on, they could be much more alien. They still have two arms, two legs, a head, etc. Tyranids come the closest to being original in design, but are still not that different. Oh, ya got six eyes do ya? Well that’s great but you still have a mouth and arms and legs where they typically go. This is a species from literally another galaxy and the best we can do is a couple extra limbs and eyes? This is a call for creators to take some risks and make some cool looking stuff.
~If you were to make a new race completely alien, what would it look like?
