Pastel Grimdark Space Marine Cross Stitch Pattern (40K Parody)

The K stands for Kawaii. 

or

"Friendship is magic. And magic is heresy"

I made this pattern based on a one-word prompt, "Grimdark", provided by my Patreon subscribers

Grimdark as a genre takes its name from the tagline of a Warhammer 40K board game, "In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war."

I have personally never really been a fan of Grimdark, I think because it's one of those things where the satire got missed by a big portion of its fanbase, and they wound up romanticizing the things that the genre was supposed to be satirizing, like the rampant misogyny and adolescent nihilism. Liz Bourke kinda hit the nail on the head in her review of "The Dark Defiles," the finale of a grimdark book trilogy. 

It is that grim darkness that gives me complicated feelings. "Grimdark" is a shorthand in modern fantasy literature for a subgenre that values its gritty realism, and that attempts to overturn long-established heroic tropes. As much a locus for critical and definitional argument as anything else (eg: What counts as "realism"? Why are some tropes overturned and not others?), for me its defining characteristic lies in a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action—in terms of personal morality - as either impossible or futile. (I think it's a nihilism that many people find comforting: if everything is terrible and no moral decision can either be meaningful or have any lasting effect, then it rather absolves one from trying to make things better, doesn't it?)

And that kinda got me thinking about how people who miss the satire in something (almost always men, let's be honest) then make much (or all) of their identity. C.F. Rick and Morty, South Park, Game of Thrones. Which is all to say, Grimdark and in particular the seminal property of the genre, Warhammer 40,000, has a real incel problem. I saw quite a few thinkpieces during my research phase defending the "women can't be Space Marines" viewpoint. I guess it's not surprising then that less than 7% of players are women. 

So I wanted to make something 40K, but kawaii. Warhammer 40Kawaii.