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Based on what I have seen on the internet, the fandom for W40K seems to violently hate them, while the people who work at GW seem to adore them. Is this perception mistaken?
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ultramarines#.UVw_ZpOTjng For those not in the know.
Comments
That's pretty much it. The Ultramarines are about as vanilla as Space Marines get, and Space Marines aren't exactly the most interesting characters in 40k to begin with. Other chapters of Space Marines are stuff like space crusaders, space vikings, space vampires and whatnot, but all the Ultramarines do is win every battle in the lore as generically as possible.
They're space romans.
Being boring is in the job description.
^^It's not just because they're generic so much as they're generic and they get massive, obnoxious, amounts of author favoritism. "We're the best! Every other lame chapter wishes they could be us." get's grating. Fast.
I don't see why you'd choose to make the Ultramarines your Mary Sue chapter.
I mean, I can see putting them in media, because they're basically the generic marines, but I don't see what would make you a genuine fan of them.
Well, this IS Matt Ward we're talking about, He has a tendency to make Mary Sues out of anything he touches (see also Blood Angels, and Grey Knights).
^^I think it's a case of the inmates running the asylum. Matt Ward has always played Ultramarines, and when he became GW's codex writers that fact now shows.
Ultramarines used to be the vanilla marines. They were the basis, both storywise and game play, of 70 percent of chapters. Them being the first among equals wasn't really anything new or controversial since there was a lot of wriggle room to create grimdark marines, and the Ultramarines were presented with some pretty big flaws (lol we can't adapt to nids).
Problem is that Matt Ward basically said "no your army must be space marine or it is dieing" so it shrunk the amount you could create interesting stuff and be true to fluff. Not to mention the whole "Every space marine chapter cries itself to sleep because they aren't as cool and awesome as ultramarines and don't have rowbutt girlyman as their primarch.
But as far as Mary Sue chapters go, I'd say the Grey Knights are Mary Sues. They went from a grimdark group of super ultra mega marines that make the Black Templar look fair and balanced to a group of super ultra mega marines that had the best units, allies and heroes. I'd bring up the Blood Angels, but really Matt Ward's writing is basically "look at how overpowered these guys are and how much you want to be them."
As awful of a writer as Gav Thorpe was, he was good at making fluff and making distinct factions and armies. Now we got a guy with the same writing skill who wants to focus on the -worst- parts of 40k.
Weren't the Space Wolves already the Mary Sues of the Space Marines?
In how they get away with blatantly ignoring the Codex and telling the Inquisition to fuck off, maybe. But in general... eh, they can't even manage to get a single successor chapter going!
The Space Wolves aren't Mary Sueish as much as they're a beacon of almost acceptable morality in an otherwise grimderp setting.
The Space Wolves are Tau?
Hey remember the time the Grey Knights worked together with some Sisters of Battle to bring in a chaos artifact, and it was found that the Knights couldn't get close to it but the Sisters could because the nuns were pure of heart, so the Knights killed all the Sisters, painted their armor with their blood, fooled the artifact, and then hi-fived each other and went home?
good times
I thought this was about the Grant Morrison's JLA.
but instead i got boring W40K stuff
you say that as if one of those dudes wasn't a gigantic jelly being
Goraiko was so cool she was in Big Science Action.