This is what happens when we dont have basic rights like universal healthcare or stable jobs. And the "lesser evil" political party has nothing to offer besides vague phony optimism.
More and more people are being pushed to the fringe right due to the failures of capitalism.
We need better.
I'm just too busy painting my models and not learning the rules
By painting even a single model you are already infinitely better than the average warhammer fan, especially when that model looks as good as your forgefiend.
What am I hearing, here?
I played Warhammer as a kid. Half or more of the fun was painting the models and making scenery.
Are you telling me that people 'play' the game without doing that bit? What's the point of that?
A large number of warhammer "fans" (it would not be unreasonable to guess that this group is even a slight majority) do not engage with the hobby in any physical way, and instead just do things like watch lore videos, play the video games, and repeat memes. I would argue that most of the chuds who get really pissed off about the idea of female space marines or start larping as imperials fall into this group. This group has become larger over time as GW's prices continuously rise (driving people away from the physical game), the setting became more mainstream (largely through video games and fanworks), and especially when it became possible to play the tabletop game entirely on a computer in the "game" Tabletop Simulator (~$10 for a copy on Steam to play as any faction you want vs ~$500-1000 and dozens of hours to play one army).
There are also a decent number of people who do play the physical tabletop game that purchase and build models, but do not paint them. Historically, tournaments enforced a rule that models must have at least 3 colors on them, and in the newest edition of 40k there are explicitly 10 bonus points that each player receives at the end of the game if their army is painted to a similar standard. I can say that in my friend group, there is one person who painted a few models, decided he didn't like painting, and now just has the rest as plain gray plastic.
I completely understand the price point. That was one of the reasons I spent most of my time painting/creating. I'd painstakingly spruce up a small set or a special (read: metal) second hand figure because I couldn't afford enough pieces to join in many games and none of my friends could afford any figures at all.
It's a real shame. I live in hope that someone will come up with a rather simple open source version that you can play with any figures, rejecting the apparent rule changes that mean people buy/paint pieces and then discover they can't use them in the next edition of the rule book.
Down with capitalists.
Luckily, someone's already made just that! The starter set even comes with paper templates to cut out for paper standees. (I guess it's only arguably open source but they have a custom tool that you can use to make your own armies so that's good enough for me)
Oh that's brilliant. Much more my thing than GW. Thanks for the link!