Thursday, July 14, 2011

Random Musings (In Which I Mention Warhammer 40,000, Five Star Stories, and Magic: The Gathering)

I was recently going through GEARS Online's excellent Five Star Stories pages, just about the only place to find information on this particular mecha franchise (which has beautiful mecha at a level of detail that is unusual). As I read aspects of the story, which included a human god called Amaterasu who became emperor of humankind, I realized that it sounded kind of familiar.

Warhammer 40,000, for instance, has pretty much exactly the same story, except it's much darker and grimmer (and grimdarker, I guess). And with aliens. (It's not just the god-emperor thing, either-there's a lot of parallels if you look for them. For instance, both series have genetically engineered people and psychics all over the place who are used mostly for making war, lost technology, and so on. Note that I'm not even invoking the fact that both settings use giant robots. ...Wait.)

On the really dark end of the scale, though, are the Phyrexians from Magic: The Gathering. The parallels become even more twisted here, but they're still there. Yawgmoth is pretty much the same thing as the other two's god-emperors, only even more exaggerated and in this case completely horrific. (Also, it turns out [LOL SPOILERS] he started as a doctor trying to cure a disease.)

Ultimately, the only differences are in the ways their universes work and the end results. (Well, that and Amaterasu being a girly guy, while WH40's Emperor of Mankind is now essentially a near-corpse in life support, and Yawgmoth is a giant spherical machine demon that may be about the size of a planet...)

-Signing off.

No comments: