: I'd like to add that how your story handles humour is an important part of this. 40k is a world that's clearly not to be taken seriously for us. It's not only dark to the point of parody,

@Berryessa137

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I'd like to add that how your story handles humour is an important part of this. 40k is a world that's clearly not to be taken seriously for us. It's not only dark to the point of parody, but it also has orcs who're sentient fungi and speak with working class English accents. However, almost all 40k characters take everything very seriously and play everything completely straight. They cannot acknowledge that their world is silly, only the readers do, which leads to a certain disconnect.

Take as a counterexample the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski and the games based on it by CD Project RED. The Witcher world is pretty dark as well. The usual reaction to conflict is murder, the usual reaction to beauty is rape, the usual reaction to children is whippings. However, the characters in the series acknowledge that their world is shitty and they'll even joke about it - in completely in-universe dark and dry humour. They're not stoically heroic space marines but people who have to deal with a shitty environment, trying to make the best of it and one of their coping mechanisms is gallow's humour - just like it would be for many real people.

One verse has a silly world with people inside being very serious about it while nobody outside takes it seriously and one has a serious world with people being silly about it inside and people outside having a lot more respect for it. This is partly because we can empathise with the characters in the Witcher, including their jokes. The humour makes the world more real and serious. If you've ever seen some political cabaret, it basically consists of telling people the truth in witty ways and people laugh in order not to cry, because the truth is actually really depressing. A world that contains humans, but not humour, is inherently silly. Silliness is not dark. But silly people can be.

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