Imperial fans like to defend the Imperium by asserting that humanity's alien allies all betrayed them during the Age of Darkness, 10K years before the Emperor. But did this actually happen or is this "common knowledge" - aka, shit that's wrong, but everybody presumes it's right? Are there any sources that claim this outright? As far as I'm aware, all of the 40K core rulebooks across all ten editions only talk about "traitor", "betrayed" or "betrayal" in reference to the Horus Heresy, never aliens. Where in the writing is this concept brought up?
Yes, it happened. It didn't happen all the time - there were some instances where humanity could work with nearby xenos (though in most cases, if it was something like the Eldar then it was usually the Eldar manipulating humanity anyway). But it happened the majority of times, enough that a lot of the Crusade did involve freeing humanity from the yoke of various xenos species.
The White Scars and later Blood Angels/Luna Wolves experience an example of this enslavement with the Nephilim, who enslaved millions (or billions/trillions, since they were spread across dozens and dozens of worlds and systems and more) of humans to turn them into psychic batteries.
It's also not accurate to wholly describe it as xenos betraying humanity during the Age of Darkness, because that implies xenos races were all allies, which they weren't. It's more that humanity was the big swinging dick in the galaxy at the time with their tech and Men of Iron legions (the Eldar had retreated into a few garden worlds and the Webway and were busy fricking their own eyeballs out with cocaine-coated wieners). When humanity got hit with the Age of Strife warpstorms, coupled to the Men of Iron rebellion, a lot of the xenos races that had been living under humanity's threat or yoke decided that now was as good a time as any to overthrow them and carve out their own little slice of the galaxy. When an empire begins to collapse, the opportunists and neighbours all come out of the woodwork to make sure they have a piece or three of the pie.
>It's more that humanity was the big swinging dick in the galaxy at the time with their tech and Men of Iron legions
Humans were a 3rd rate power living on the rocks the eldar empire had deemed beneath them and were entirely content to stay on the millions of paradise worlds in what would eventually become the eye. Their own gods were as tools to them, even men of iron have a losing matchup against an entire army of khaine demons backed by countless wraith titans and immortal clone-warriors. The blackstone fortresses are talismans of vaul after all. They were at the time all posessed by the eldar along with countless other superweapons, and they could at any time just build more. When the eldar say stars lived and died at their command its not an exaggeration, if anything its an understatement
>(busy fricking their own eyeballs out with cocaine-coated wieners)
That part is true
>3rd rate
Seething elf hands wrote this.
Cope, seethe & dil8. Eldar made gods, you made halfbaked zombie on a broken chair.
Eldar fear the zombie. Harlequins laugh at Slaanesh, but the Emperor terrifies them.
Most of the xenos didn't betray humanity. Rather, humanity had forcefully subjugated them in the past, and then when humanity was in a position of weakness, they rose up. Saying that they 'betrayed' Humanity is like saying that Poland betrayed the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising.
Pooland betrayed Europe when they dragged France and the UK into a local war after spending the previous decade aggressively expanding on other countries' territories.
>when they dragged France and the UK into a local war
Which France and the UK did willingly because of German aggression.
They were forced to declare war by a treaty. Poland was offered an alliance and soviet territory by Germany in exchange for a corridor to Danzig, but they chose to drag the world into hell instead.
>appeasement
>in exchange for a corridor to Danzig
Germany already had a corridor. They just wanted more land.
Some xenos races were allies. Others weren't.
Aliens were never all that relevant because other than orks (already everywhere), eldar (webway) and humans (navigators) no one could move far or fast enough to be a big deal.
There were plenty of aliens that had relevance. K’nib were leftovers from the WiH (so they must be pretty potent), Rangdan were so powerful they required the Emperor release the void dragon to beat them, Nephilim were subjugating all sorts of human worlds, Hrud were all across the Galaxy, etc.
Rangda weren't really encountered by the DAoT Humanity, I believe. They had always lurked in the Halo Stars near the very edge of the galactic north, and never came out while Eldar and later humans dominated the galaxy.
The Eldar spoke about a “thousand” alien foes they defeated during their reign that were much stronger than the Imperium ever was. So there was plenty of powerful aliens around.
It's roughly accurate.
To put it in simple terms, Aliens could be divided up into three groups.
>Directly and overwhelmingly dangerous and hostile.
>Dangerous, but not immediately a problem and situationally allies.
>Varying danger, but open to alliances.
Pre-Long night, most xenos were in the mid category. Eldar were frankly increasingly shit (Dark Eldar was the galactic standard, not Craftworlders), but not impossible to negotiate with until the very end.
During long night and the Unification and Crusade Eras, it was pretty much only groups one and two. Dark Eldar pirate raiders taking slaves, Ork warbands, and the occasional horrible murder-rape aliens like the Rangdan or the Hrud, that were just completely omnicidal or impossible to coexist with.
The third type did exist in tiny amounts, and there were procedures, and xenos-specific embassies, but the vast, vast majority were wiped out by Orks, or enslaved by the Dark Eldar as, arguably, Humanity was the cutoff point for how violent and xenophobic a species needed to be to survive in the galaxy.
Even then, these tended to either be; very small clutches of secretive species ala the Cabal, or less murder-rape-edgey Eldar, who were still scummy and arrogant, but not complete monsters.
The galaxy was a genuinely nightmarish place, with the least horrifying aliens out there being fricking Orks. Which are 8 foot tall, half-ton mountains of nigh-unkillable muscle and teeth with a biological need to kill you, and is functionally the greatest weapon ever made.
Of course, this is quite different in M41. In M41 the Emperor's more nuanced and situation specific stance has been taken to "Kill anything that doesn't look like us", and over the ten thousand years of Imperial galactic dominance there have been genuinely agreeable races that have grown, most notable being the Tau, whom the Emperor would probably have bent over backwards to assimilate into the Empire.
>But did this actually happen
Yes. Everyone is evil in the Warhammer setting.
Is everyone evil, or is that just what THEY want you to think?
>Is everyone evil, or is that just what THEY want you to think?
I'm not evil, just batshit insane!
You are just a simp for genestealers.
It's just conjecture based on some throwaway lines from pre-Horus Heresy series lore.
As far as we know DAOT humans acted just like the Great Crusade and Imperium era i.e purge the xenos but just without doing it for the emprah.
They didn’t until the lore was written to justify it.
Cause 40K cannot have nuance.
I think it's a mistake that the Drukhari are the only evil xenos on the tabletop who would have been around for the great crusade, because it really does seem like humanity went off the deep end for no reason. In the lore there are tons of xenos who were bad fricking news, the Hrud and Morty's adopted dad are two examples.
Hrud are just dangerous animals and there's no evidence anyone had peace treaties with them so they could not have backstabbed anyone. The Overlords were probably human-adjacent since they fricked the peasants like Typhus' mom.
>Calas’ expression turned stony. ‘My kind? Do you know what my kind did, in the village where I was born? They drowned my mother and tried to do the same to me. All because she had been unlucky enough to have an Overlord take a shine to her face.’ He lost himself in the flames for a moment. ‘I’m an outsider like you.'
Death to spaceBlack folk.
It never happened. It’s fanfiction. I have never once seen a citation for this claim in all these years.
Even if it did happen it’s likely humanity just as often turned against their alien allies.
Eh, depends. The age of strife was pretty much a post apocalypse for every single intelligent species in the galaxy, so as humanity degenerated into mad max mode, so did any xenos allies they had made during the DAOT, so everyone went collectively insane. And it definitely happened in the solar system, there were numerous xenos raiders and slavers in the solar system who are implied to have betrayed humanity during the age of strife. However, factions like the diasporex prove that Empy was mostly using "they stabbed us in the back" as an excuse for galactic manifest destiny. Taking over the galaxy wholesale means you need a lot of dead bugs, which means you can't have people sympathizing with them, which means that you need to gear the population into thinking every single xeno race is just as bad as orks and enslavers
Once most of the work was done, Emps started to recline a bit in his stance too, opening up xenos embassies in the Imperial Palace (these did not survive the horus heresy) and trying to form a pact with the Eldar, which didn't work because Eldrad and friends saw Fulgrim was corrupted by Chaos early on and immediately noped out, though 10k years later it seems eldrad changed his mind what with the Guilliman business
I don't think xenos embassies ever made it to canon, HH series never mentions them.
Eldrad never changed his mind, he's been working with the Emperor since day one of the plan. Had Fulgrim not encountered the Laer blade when he did (and that it was her was literally completely random chance, even Slaanesh himself knows he got lucky according to Erebus), he would have continued on his direct course through the Eldar worlds, a route planned for him by Terra, and probably would have been intended to meet with Eldrad and have a much more polite discussion than what ultimately happened.
>Imperial fans like to defend the Imperium by asserting that humanity's alien allies all betrayed them during the Age of Darkness,
Post examples. Alien allies is not commonly refereed to at all in 40k.
>did thing in the "Age of Darkness", a period of time defined by canonically having no actual answers and nothing but myth and legend, actually happen?
Fricking moron.