This video of kawaii Space Marines is canon, actually

I know very little about Warhammer 40,000. I know it chiefly as a very expensive way to sit in a shop and move little figurines around on a Saturday, which in my youth I had neither the income nor self-confidence to try. I have a number of friends and colleagues who understand it on a foundational level, though, and they assure me that one of the benefits of the setting is that by lining up enough of the vast number of bizarre and bombastic parameters by which it operates, and squinting at them with sufficient determination, you can assemble a robust enough headcanon to justify pretty much any scenario you can imagine.

The best example of this I have been presented with is the fan reaction to the 2023’s Boltgun, which gave Warhammer 40k the boomer shooter treatment. In it, Space Marine protagonist Malum Caedo carves an implausibly bloody swathe through continental quantities of opponents while shouting instead of breathing. This is, I was assured, emphatically in line with the job description of the genetically enhanced warriors of the Adeptus Astartes - but even the most hardbitten tabletop Space Marine player would need an implausible number of perfect dice rolls to achieve even a fraction of Caedo's success.

The fans had a solution. Boltgun, the theory went, was actually a neat piece of diagesis; an in-universe propaganda tool designed to be played by trainee officers of the Astra Militarum (the conventionally human armies of 40k's Imperium of Man) in order to impress upon them just how unstoppable their elite transhuman allies were. (Meanwhile 2025's Boltgun: Words of Vengeance, which is a version of Boltgun given the Typing of the Dead treatment, was the equivalent for the bureaucrats of the galaxy-spanning Adeptus Munitorum.)

This context established, Boltgun's contempt for the idea of battlefield accuracy became downright immersive, as did its visual presentation – a perfect match for a universe where cultural attitudes to computing make Dune's Butlerian Jihad look like an OpenAI press release. Simple.

Having been presented with this masterpiece of rationalisation, I had to check back when I came across this video of newly-released and extremely successful gacha RPG thing Arknights Endfield, modded to swap out its character models with those of - I think - Space Marine 2. Can the Warhammer canon expand to contain Space Marines sashaying, twirling, and blushing in their space amour?

Of course it could. The email I got back was so good I am going to reproduce it unedited:

“If we are to imagine Boltgun as a lurid morale booster, designed to inspire the embattled remnants of humanity with awe for the Emperors's Angels, then surely this is the inverse - a sanity-crumbling vision sprung from the will of Tzeentch, chaos God of madness and profligate change, and spun into malignant skrapcode by the hereteks of the Dark Mechanicus.”

“Space Marines are the epitome of many absolutes, even by the measure of their detractors; they are grim. They are relentless. They are capable of enduring the unendurable. Whimsical, however, they are not. And if the concept of Kawaii even persists in the 41st Millennium, it's… well, it's fair to say it's not their vibe. I can only imagine that the image of legendary Ultramarine Lieutenant Demetrian Titus, blushing and hiding a shy grin behind his anvil-sized gauntlets, when broadcast in response to a planetary governor's plea for reinforcements against a marauding Chaos warfleet, would collapse Imperial resistance faster than any number of daemons spilling from a hole in reality.”

“And the cherry on this thoroughly cursed technogothic gateau? Fans outside of China can't seem to work out whether, or at least to what extent, the footage in question is the result of generative AI (Abominable Intelligence, in the parlance of Warhammer 40,000) and thus the result of collusion with actual, real world incomprehensible evils.”

“This vision of modded Arknights might be as unauthorised as fanworks can possibly get, but nevertheless, I feel it has only deepened my authentic understanding of the forces of chaos.”

So there you have it. Warhammer canon can handily contain Space Marines dancing, leaping, and drawing glowing heart shapes in the air; I look forward to the steamy visual novel.