While I can’t stand fanfiction, I adore fanmusic! Now, cruel and heartless people may say that this is because I have very definite ideas about what makes for good fiction, but no taste whatsoever when it comes to music. But at least it makes it really easy for me to find something to listen to, so nyyyyeeeeeehhhh to you, music-nerds!
Anyway, one thing I particularly love about fanmusic is that it can look at a franchise from different perspectives, fleshing out things that might otherwise be one-note. The best example is Warhammer 40,000, which is one of those things that I keep trying to get properly into but can never quite seem to make it. And one reason for that is of course that there’s just too damn much of it, but there’s also the fact that it’s all kind of samey. Here’s one grim, violent thing. Here’s another grim, violent thing. Here’s a third thing, and it’s really grim. And also violent. After a while, I just throw up my hands and go looking for something that’s not quite so humourless.
Still, I do enjoy a bit of grimdark badassery, and you can make awesome music for those aspects. Case in point, this supremely epic tribute to the Adepta Sororitas:
Awwwwww yeah. Ave Imperator, baby! The nuns with guns are coming to cleanse you of sin, with as much burning promethium as it will take! Honestly, I don’t know why this one doesn’t have more likes, it’s deeply awesome.
But of course, if you take the setting seriously, it’s also a deeply tragic and depressing place, so that’s also a perspective to explore. And in a galaxy where everyone is perpetually angry and miserable, no one is angrier or more fundamentally hosed than Angron, Demon Primarch of the World Eaters.
I kid you not, this one hits me in the feelz every time. Which is saying something, because it’s about a character that was created to sell plastic miniatures of big red demons with cybernetic dreadlocks. But man… The story it tells is of a person born into slavery and forced to rage and kill for the sick pleasure of cruel masters, and who tried to get away from it, only to end up doomed to an eternity of raging and killing for the sick pleasure of the ultimate cruel master. Now the galaxy burns, and still he roars…. No honour, no glory, just oceans of red… It really paints a picture of a tragic monster, screaming on the inside even as he rampages.
And then, of course, you can play it for laughs. That’s pretty easy too. And no one is better for that than the inimitable Commissar Ciaphas Caine, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!
Kind of sums the character up, to be honest. Especially the part about, But if I live, I’ll take the fame / Just don’t expect me to do it again (spoiler: they totally expected him to do it again!). Also, I love how in the middle of the chaos, with Caine running around frantically trying to survive, Jurgen is calmly sitting there having a snack. Because Jurgen doesn’t sweat the small stuff. The Emperor protects, after all.
Speaking of Caine, possibly the most unlikely direction to take W40K is romance, but… there is some of it in the setting, and you’d better believe that the shippers will mine every last crumb of it. So we’ll conclude with a sweet love song by Inquisitor Amberley Vail:
And yes, the good Inquisitor can, canonically, carry a tune. First time Caine met her, she was undercover as a stage singer. I especially like the world-weary resignation of it, the sense of a slow, sad smile behind the words. Amberley isn’t sentimental. She knows that she and Caine both pass themselves off as something they’re not, that they both have hands soaked in blood, and that they’re both part of a war that is as hopeless as it is neverending. But they still managed to touch each other’s hearts, to see each other’s humanity beneath the masks. And at the end of a long, hard life, that means something to her.
So there you go – four different takes on a setting, set to music. I feel like that makes it all the more approachable. And if nothing else, these are four pieces I enjoy listening to over and over.