Honestly, being that this is a horror AND dark fantasy column, I’ve been neglecting dark fantasy. Sure I brought up Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft, some of the 20th century’s more renowned surveyors of the darker side of fantasy, but I’ve never really brought up any one topic in dark fantasy and discussed it with you at length. This time around, the topic is the long-lived game and fiction of “Warhammer.”
There are a couple of things that you may notice in the differences between high fantasy and dark fantasy. First, with high fantasy there’s always hope. Regardless of how bad it gets, there are those who will stand firm and win the day on both their morals and their laurels. Dark fantasy takes the other route. There is no hope because history will repeat itself. War never ends. The legions of the damned never stop growing. We are doomed. If we survive, it isn’t on our morals or laurels. It was just getting lucky at dodging the bullet the last time.
“Warhammer” and its sci-fi successor “Warhammer 40,000” follow the tenets of dark fantasy to the letter. “Warhammer 40,000” will be discussed at length in a later column, though. The world(s) are ones besieged by war on a physical, mental and spiritual level. With “Warhammer” there are two sides. There is the Alliance of Order (humans, high elves, wood elves, dwarves and halflings). Then there is the Alliance of Destruction (orks, dark elves, vampires, zombies, beastmen, ratmen/skaven, chaos and all the daemons, gods and demi-gods that followers of chaos follow). Just because there is an unspoken alliance, it’s very shaky. They are little more than alliances of convenience when there’s something else to kill.
The world of “Warhammer” is a mixture of feudal Europe as a whole and England circa the Industrial Revolution. Each of the races are various stereotypes around the world. Orks are sports hooligans at large, where their biggest ambition is to hit something with something else while drunk. Dwarves are mine workers, spending most of their lives in holes in the ground, fighting when they’re called short and don’t have much in the way of money, but lots in the way of resources. High elves are the upper class who don’t know anything about a hard day’s work. Dark elves are the same as high elves if they got involved in drugs. Wood elves are the high elves who just decided to hide in the woods drinking wine and philosophizing about nature and spirituality. Humans are your standard middle class, just sneaking by with enough to survive and occasionally getting something nice, but the nicety comes at a high cost. Vampires are cold, heartless bloodsuckers that usually enjoy some finery aka lawyers. Zombies are zombies much like any other conception. Chaos is self-explanatory. It’s a force that causes random mutations and events that horrify some and amuse others. By random mutations, I mean like a human randomly losing his/her legs and sprouting eight spider legs or someone’s forearm turning into a sword. It doesn’t make sense. The daemons are simply daemons. There’s no other way to put it. They are the malevolent forces “beyond the veil of madness.”
As stated earlier, the world is both sustained and destroyed by the economy of war. Someone is always fighting someone else, whether it’s a matter of honor, morality or just basic survival. Even the heroes are not safe from the embrace of death, as the “Vampire Wars” omnibus shows. Everyone who was an icon of heroism or infamy dies a horrible death and war just continues. Everyone fights. Everyone dies eventually. There is no hope for peace, and often you’ll find yourself right back at the beginning again, as shown in “The Blackhearts Omnibus” where at the end, when they’ve just escaped service at the point of a blade, their only option is to join the militia serving under their former enslaver.
There is just no hope, and it works. It works as fiction for the games of the franchise. It works as stand-alone fiction. It works as fantasy, but due to its hopelessness, it’s not your regular high fantasy or pulp fantasy. It’s just purely gothic and absolutely gorgeous dark fantasy.
If you would like to know more about “Warhammer” and games/fiction like “Warhammer” you can contact Jonathan Gronli at jon.gronli@gmail.com.