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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Nah. Tyranids may be the less unique horror villain, but they are the better one. (IMO, of course.)

Mindless things that kill you just to kill you are boring horror. There's nothing particularly lovecraftian about dumb robots / terminators that don't have a higher reason to kill you- it's just robots carrying out their programming. You may not be able to stop it, but it's not a force of nature premise either- it's just artifical constructs gone wrong, rather than, well, the nature. The C'tan shards were already really just stronger units that could be defeated with artillery or the hero of the hour, and downgrading them to the equivalent of newcron personalities would further downgrade the urgency. That's not cosmic horror, that's just a resourcing issue- there are a finite number of C'tan shards, and when they're gone they're gone.

Mindless things that kill you to eat you are a greater form of existential horror because it taps into primeval prey-dread instincts. They are a force of nature precisely because of how low-level and base the motive is- they don't kill/value you for mind, or your culture, or because god says so- they're just hungry and you're just meat. It's nature at its most brutal, and disempowering in a way that being overpowered by terminators isn't. Additionally, having the elite units be explicitly expendable and replaceable undercuts the triumph of resistance needed for the dread- it doesn't matter if you kill the swarm lord, the fleets in the dark just produce another, and there are always more fleets in the dark to do so.

Then there's the matter of scale.

The Necron are planetary-engineering scale, and outside of some ill-thought 'GW will never use them' lore-only throw-away items, that's as big as they are. The Imperium cracks planets on the regular, so while a Necron Deathstar-equivalent has narrative weight, it is- again- a resourcing issue.

By contrast, the extra-galactic nature of the Tyrannid approach lets them be depicted at galactic-scale. The Tyranid Hive Mind literally encompasses substantial fractions of the galaxy. The Tyranids aren't a resourcing issue because they can be depicted as bringing in more resources than the setting has to resist with. They're not beyond planetary-scale engineering either- that is how they strip planets of biomass and there's the lore-only flesh-planet-thing that was itnroduced later- but for the presentation of horror-via-scale, the Tyranids trump the Necrons simply by starting from a larger scale.

Then there are the appeals to lovecraftian horror.

Oldcrons weren't particularly lovecraft. Or rather, the only particularly lovecraftian thing were the pariahs and flayers- otherwise it was pretty clean and comprehensible. The necrons were murder-bots, made to murder, subject to greedy gods who plotted against them. Which is contrary to lovecraft's major themes of corruptive breeding between pure and alien, incomprehensible motives for which death/madness were a consequence rather than a point, and gods so far beyond us that the terrifying thing is that they don't pay attention to us and our existence will end as a consequence of their own movements for their own purposes. The insignificance of humanity such that C'thulu doesn't even try to murder us is why C'thulu works as a cosmic horror figure.

Tyranids are far more lovecraftian to many of lovecraft's major themes. This includes the interbreeding and corruption of cults, the organic/fleshy/aquatic imagery, and cosmic-scale indifference. The Tyranid Hive Mind does take a distinct difference in that it has a comprehensible motive- hunger- but that motive is itself aligned to the themes of disempowering 'you are not special' of Lovecraft's gods. The Hive Mind is an incomprehensible mind, and we are just in the way of it doing it's own thing for its own reasons.

The tyranids may not be unique threats, but they are both (a) a better force-of-nature antagonist than the Necrons, and (b) were better lovecraftian-horror antagonists than the Oldcrons.