See This, This Is What I Like About TikTok. Little Moments Like This

See this, this is what I like about TikTok. Little moments like this

whats cool about being trans is my parents are totally right. i did kill their beautiful son. im the thing that animates his corpse in an ever more convincing parody of a happy girl. i devoured him from the inside out and now there is nothing left of him and he is dead dead dead and there is only me, with my hollow eyes and dark eyeliner and long hair, and my big smile. my limp, effeminate gestures belie the marionetting of the boy they loved. my fagginess is his death. already his body becomes a fitter home for my parasitism in full; the tits, the hips, the thighs. sorry about your kid. thanks for the biomass <3

So a thing I’ve noticed about necron books…

I do not think it is controversial to say that Robert Rath and Nate Crowley really defined how a lot of us (especially me) view necrons in modern 40k lore. They did so much heavy lifting to take the faction that was literally just Terminator ripoff (aka Tyranids but worse) and make them into characters.

But they did it in such different and almost contradictory ways. And I think it boils down to this:

Rath's necrons are gods who were once mortal. Crowley's necrons are mortals forced to become gods.

(disclaimer: I don't think one author is "more correct" or whatever. Different characters experience the universe in different ways, embrace a little subjectivity does objective truth even exist?)

Let's start with Crowley. In both Severed and Twice Dead King, memories and bodies are defining features of their narratives. Oltyx can and does revisit his memories at will (not without consequence get your pins out and put em in). He is haunted by disphorakh, this feeling that he should have an organic body but does not and that this disconnect is actually killing him. The flayed ones' whole existence is steeped (literally) in flesh and blood and disphoria.

On the slightly less extreme end, in Severed Obyron remembers the flesh times vividly: the battles, the people, who and what he's lost. They are fighting the manifestation of what Obyron fears becoming: a mindless machine, “severed” from his past experiences. And the ultimate stakes in a Crowley book? Loss of memory. Loss of self. Obyron and Oltyx pay this price throughout their stories, and it eats away at them. Necrodermis makes their physical selves immortal, but their minds? Just as mortal as ever. If not even more so. The people they are were formed in flesh times, and all immortality does is wear away at them as they desperately try to cope.

Robert Rath's necrons? Not so much. Sure, Trazyn and Orikan angst about their loss of memory, but the memories of flesh for them are so distant and unreliable that they could not build their personalities around them even if they wanted to. Trazyn's link to the past is external: objects he has collected. Orikan... what memories he has of his past are fuzzy and in some cases straight up manipulated. That's distressing, but not enough to totally rock his sense of self. That’s a stark contrast to how Crowley’s necrons operate.

We all know the iconic Old Man Fight from Infinite and the Divine. Where Rath describes Trazyn and Orikan fighting and points out how stupid it would be back in the flesh times? Just two nerds hitting each other with canes. Well the flip side of that is that what is actually happening is NOT two nerds slapping each other but two immortals with incomprehensible power battling on a scale mortals cannot process.

Rath’s necrons operate on scales mortals barely understand. Oh, the Greek gods destroyed one city? Troy took em ten years? Trazyn and Orikan wiped out a planet's population by accident. And they are both so divorced from mortality that they don't care. Sheesh, Trazyn is so alienated from the idea of a body that in War in the Museum he informs a woman that he’s filled her up with her own dead sisters organs and I legit believe he thought this would make her feel better.

I adore both approaches! The differences in character and perspective, how they relate to the world and themselves. Yes, it creates contradictions in the lore (like why doesn’t Trazyn lose his shit knowing people like Zahndrekh or Oltyx just…remember necrontyr society perfectly clearly) but I aggressively do not care. I love the varying explorations or power, the nature of the self, the truth that none of these people have survived immortality “in tact.” Those are exactly the things that make necrons my favorite 40k faction. Hell, one of my favorite sci if aliens ever. Because both approaches are haunting and hilarious and poignant and so damn cool.

So…uh…thanks guys. Yeah.

Via r/Grimdank

But seriously necrons are queer AF...

I basically can't shut up about necrons and how they really lend themselves to queer theory/queer interpretation and I want to dive into that a little. I am not An Intellectual by any means, so someone else could definitely do this better, but an imperfect hero is better than none (there's a joke about Trazyn on Cadia here but I'm too lazy to flesh it out).

I'm more interested in how a) Queer Theory is all about challenging the default cishet lens through which the majority of media is created/analyzed/consumed and b) the fact that necron existence is basically 12 Queer Metaphors in an Trenchcoat

Necrons come to the table raising some interesting narrative questions: how does a being exist without a soul? What even IS a soul? What is mortality? How does all of that relate to the mind and to the body?

Biotransference, when you get right down to it, took the three basic parts of what we might think of as "the self" (mind, body, soul) and divided them. The soul vanished, while the body and mind remained, but the relationship between them was completely recontextualized. So all those big questions above can only be answered in that context. This ties so beautifully into themes of queer experience because queerness also invites a reimagining of the spirit/mind/body relationship. How the body relates to identity and vice versa. How that combination relates to other people. Any singular "default" answer of x body=y identity=z mental state does not exist for necrons. How can it when each individual deals with their own existence in such varying ways? From denial to distraction to euphoric acceptance, and each individual's character is largely defined by that choice.

This can be more explicitly LQBTQ-themed (my kingdom for a story about Anathrosis, the canonically trans dynasty Matriarch) or metaphorical. It can dwell on inner conflict or external conflicts. This separation was not something they chose, but it is a fundamental fact of their existence. You basically have no choice but to tell queer stories with necrons if you want to explore their nature/characters in any depth.

Tl;dr all the space robots are gay and also disasters and sorry that's just canon