On Wednesday, Games Workshop quietly dropped a three minute animation on Warhammer Community called 'Ave Imperator - His Angels', and it's one of the most impressive pieces of Warhammer 40k animation I've ever seen, and perhaps the best since Syama Pedersen's Astartes. Just like Astartes, it shows us the Warhammer 40k universe in a way we've never seen it before - this time from the lowly perspective of a serf as she sings a hymn to the distant Emperor to send his Angels and deliver her world from devastation.
Most Warhammer 40k animation focuses on action, adventure, or horror, and Ave Imperator isn't totally bloodless - that Space Marine chapter does indeed descend from orbit to wage war before the end of the animation. But the emotional core of the story is that woman's hymn, and her thoughts turning to the members of her family dispersed throughout the imperial war machine - her partner on the front lines, others working in a factory pressing lasguns, and her young son with his toy laspistol and helmet beside her, destined to serve the war machine in one way or another.
It totally flips the perspective of most 40k stories, which, if they depict civilians at all, place them on the periphery of a tale of heroism, intrigue, or horror. Ave Imperator rebalances the scales - the short film doesn't end with the Space Marines' victory or defeat, but with the woman trying to sleep on her thin bed as explosions and energy blasts rock her hab, sending dust falling across her and eldritch light through the shuttered windows.
What really gets me about this is that this is, effectively, Games Workshop's Christmas commercial - specifically, its prestige Christmas commercial. For reasons that an advertising specialist could probably explain, each year at least one or two big retailers or manufacturers blow their Christmas ad budget on a short film meditating on the idea of family and togetherness, often with a sense of bittersweet longing. This year's Chevrolet commercial is probably the best example:
Games Workshop hasn't bought TV adverts for decades, so we're not likely to see it make a conventional prestige Christmas advert. But the motto at the end of Ave Imperator - "All Ye Faithful" - makes it clear that it is intentionally riffing on Christmas themes to lend this animation emotional effect. Yet it's not really doing this for the regular purposes that this kind of advert is put to, which is to try and associate all those Christmas feelings with a specific product for you to buy. So perhaps we should call this 'prestige Christmas world-building'? Whatever it is, I'm delighted it exists.
I'll admit, I'm not totally up to date on my Warhammer Plus animations, so if you think I've missed a show with even more emotional heft to it, let me know about it in the Wargamer Discord community. To get a weekly round up of the best stories on Wargamer, make sure you sign up to the Wargamer newsletter!