“Beneath us stretches a massive furnace room that eventually disappears into the smoky gloom. The heat is intense from the high open furnace doors; everything is bathed in a red glow. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, toil at great coal heaps, with pails and shovels, to feed the furnaces. From young children to old women, their pained frames are smeared with sweat and toil. Their labour keeps the fires burning. Braziers gutter everywhere, lending their smoke to the fumes of the furnaces.
As the elevator touches down with a loud crunching clang, Supurnis opens the door and we step out. He swings the door shut and slaps loudly on the framework of the cage, which lifts off a moment later, clanking back up into the gloom.
It's then that the noise hits me properly. There's the crackle of flames, the creaking of great steam wheels and the hiss of boiling water. But there are also groans, moans and the crack of whips. Through the gloom I see large, stooped shapes shuffling amongst the lines of workers, barbed whips in their hands, cudgels and clubs occasionally raised to beat a flagging worker about the back and shoulders.
They're unmistakably orks.” (Annihilation Squad by Gav Thorpe, page 303).
How often do you think, is it that some 40k player, somewhere, is telling someone, probably an Ork player, or writing on a forum, blog, or website that Orks are too silly (extra irony points if they call themselves “The General”) for 40k? It occurs with rather tiresome regularity. It usually revolves around the perceptions of many non-Ork players, who have most likely been enduring countless losses from a faction that doesn’t even appear to take the whole thing seriously. Of course they’ll dress that up as some comment about how it jeopardises the “grimdark” setting (the recent Grey Knights notwithstanding that actually definitely managed to) of 40k.
The sad thing is, that the Orks are not a big threat to grimdark 40k, and with Matt Ward around you’d be forgiven for thinking those days are long over. They are, rather ironically “lolgrey” instead. But let us for a moment assume that grimdark is still the dominant theme of 40k. Are Orks actually a detriment to this incredibly serious theme of death, destruction and dismay?
Of course not, they’re a primary cause of it.
Besides, who says that the 40k universe is serious? The point is that it is a glass half empty, dark, depressing, and ritually unpleasant. Some people will probably assume that such a thing is always serious, that hilarity is simply not an option. As someone who has worked as a Support Worker, and is thus one of those people for whom life can be rather unpleasant; I’m here to tell you that humour is more likely, not less. One of the ways we deal with stress is to laugh about it. I defy anyone to go into the medical profession and not come out of it with an extremely black sense of humour. It’s rather difficult not to.
Orks wont be the only ones who make things “funny”. There are many instances of hilarity from the Imperial ranks, it’s just well, there’s those damned Space Marines, who take everything absolutely seriously to a fault, and for some incredibly silly reason, they are the benchmark that applies to the whole hobby. Sometimes I wonder if some people would be happy if every faction was more like the Space Marines, but not as powerful, obviously.
Still, you’ll hear about how silly the Orks are, and how they don’t fit in. That’s just it, they do. You have a universe of only war. That is a pretty simple concept, but you add in a large collection of factions with varying perspectives about that. The Orks are one of the main factions who are extremely happy about this. They love their work, and they enjoy it immensely. Their “silly” shenanigans are simply a rather “in character” portrayal of what Orks would be like.
The question is how this fits into the “grimdark” setting. Notwithstanding the fact that 40k is pretty much a parody of itself, Orks have a rather vicious side. What seems silly concerning the Orks is actually rather serious, if you look at it from the right angle. The Orks find war funny, they chortle with delight, and mess about with silly devices that are masochistic more than they are methodical. But that’s how the Orks see it. Place yourself on the receiving end of it, and the joke isn’t quite as funny.
We view Orks as the comedy relief of 40k. That is a rather accurate observation, but we often overlook that the fluff also shows that Orks are callous, vicious murderers, thieves, and despoilers. They conquer whole worlds for sport; they enslave entire races to make weapons for them, and to sell to other races (or Ork tribes) as beasts of burden. They torture living beings for fun; they make them fight each other to death in vicious pit-fighting blood sports for a gambling pastime. They steal from corpses, and often adorn parts of them upon their armour as symbols of conquest.
Now imagine those creatures exist on your planet, and no matter how many of them you kill, more will return. If you kill them well, burn their corpses, and napalm whole areas, you might slow their replication down. You can’t track their sporing grounds, aside of digging up every shaded area in a massive radius from wherever an Orkoid might have spent any amount of time. What’s worse, is that the more you fight them, the bigger struggle you put up, the stronger they get, and the more they enjoy it.
This realisation reaches many of 40k’s near-infinite planets. Imagine being an Imperial Scholar, or perhaps even a Soldier, who learns that their planet has found Orks upon it. So, you will think, this is it, this planet’s non-greenskin lifeforms are doomed to slavery or extinction.
Sounds hilarious.
There is, of course, a silly side to Orks. But those who fight Orks, the likes of Yarrick, Dante, or Cain don’t quite see the funny side. What they see is a horrendous abomination that needs to be exterminated, because if it isn’t, their factions are ultimately doomed.
The secret to this, and many misconceptions about Orks, is, of course, having the correct context and the correct perspective. In their own context, Orks are absolutely hilarious, and every Ork player will be in on that joke. But that’s one of the wonders of perspective. We play the role of the Ork. We know how funny and hilarious all of 40k is. But there are different contexts and perspectives. It’s just sad that many 40k players lack the wit to notice. But then for something like RAW to still endure to this day, it’s clear a lot of GW’s fanboys are incapable of reading things very well, or understanding something so wonderfully simple as context.
Or perhaps the secret is even simpler. Other 40k players are jealous, and scared. They’re scared that we might have the coolest faction in the whole of 40k. Ork players have one very simple thing to say regarding that:
Hur hur hur.
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