The steam forums are in a state of mild holy war. Apparently a lot of people reaaaaaly didn't like the sacrilege here.
It doesn't seem to have the woke content people predicted but how anti religious is it?
The setting is apparently heavily inspired by Warhammer 40k so I don't think people familiar with the premise expected "woke" content.
40k's subtext is pretty woke. It draws alot of the atheist leftoid crowd which is what seemed like this game's target audience.
Now that I'm reading the book author's a rightoid conservative and that in the books the premise gets subverted, I really don't know what the intent of it all is.
Reactions you receive prove that a certain part of the human population is completely resistant to irony and takes the world of Warhammer literally (although with this stupid metaplot with the deification of Roboute, Guilliman strips Warhammer word of this irony a bit).
There's a few things to unpack here.
1. Yes, 40k started off as some bizzare punk SciFi parody a la Judge Dredd/2000 AD
2. Over time, it went from being a parody to hyper ultra grimdark, to lame grimdark, to whatever the fuck it is now (corporate sanitized grimdark?)
3. This led to a stratified fanbase of early edition fans (grognards), middle edition fans (grimdark enthusiasts) and modern edition fans (Horus Heresy noobs). Like most hobbies, older fans generally hate the changes that it went through
4. At no point would I characterize anything in 40k as being "woke," subtext or otherwise. In fact, it garnered an audience is... militantly against woke elements.
5. Since the setting is becoming more and more mainstream, Games Workshop is
trying to sanitize its image for the normies, and is
now introducing more woke elements.
6. Older fans generally hate this.
7. Somebody should post that comic about hobbies being destroyed now.