Mature Misconceptions.

[Thaluikhain]

Have you read many of the 40k books? Yeah, lots of them are just "planets die, giant warriors smashing aliens", but a lot of Imperial Guard ones show exactly this. I recall the Guants Ghosts series touches on this a number of times, especially the Seige of Vervunhive. Hell, the Gaunts Ghosts series is all about loss, its about a regiment whose planet is wiped out focuses a lot on how effects the regiment and the members. It's much more about the cost of war then a lot of other 40k series. It even has a lot of "slice of life" in the flashbacks etc of the Ghosts about their planet before they joined the Guard.

It really depends on the book and author as to how much "life in the 40k universe" there is and how much "Genetic Supermen crushing things with their manly bare hands" there is.

To an extent, most 40k stuff seems to run along the lines of "The inquisitor was really a heretic, but the marines win cause they are awesome". Sure, the Ghosts lost their homeworld, but it's not really driven home, IMHO. In fairness Abnett sticks some in, but not really that much, or that well done, IMHO, the emphasis is much more on heroes being heroic.

OTOH, some of the older Warhammer stuff could get the bleakness right. Plague Demon, by Brian Craig, comes to mind.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

I think, judging by certain people?s interpretations, Black Swan does a fairly mature job of handling a woman who?s been a victim of repressed mother-daughter sexual abuse and developed, as a result, bulimia, schizophrenia, and perfectionistic low self-esteem. (Of course, it jumped the shark a little bit when Nina?s legs somehow snapped into the shape of a swan?s and she started fucking growing wings, but I can take it as ?Hollywood symbolism?).

For the opposite, The Book of Eli. Such a boring film that doesn?t even make any sense, with no likeable characters, and comes off as pretentious Christian propaganda.

 

[gargantual]

I know the rules are two but there are so many examples to give.

Good: Akira (i know the manga's more conclusive than the film) but still addresses character, youth alienation, political corruption, and a struggling post nuke society. Everything that happens is reflective of those themes and consequential. Events that young minds aren't ready to understand the context of

Poor: TV version of the Walking Dead after Frank Darabont left. I'm sorry, this turned into terrible exploitation of the 'fall of man, and social group' ideas that zombie fiction explores. Should've just stayed close to the comic.

I think the key difference to note here, and this is something that we should take note of in all fiction. Good mature is more than the eye candy and shock. Its 'genuinely' out to just 'explore an idea. another viewpoint of an idea, or pose a question, maybe answer it' on a level that underdeveloped minds aren't ready for. Poor example of mature is out to just exploit viewers with imagery, but really has no more to say than a street peddler.

 

[Agayek]

Speaking of flippin' Warhammer 40-flippin-K... Both its audience and the writers, I feel, focus far too much on how terrible everything is. It's an interesting universe, but we never get to see anything but the bog standard suffering, war and big men in armour hitting each other.
At least give us a glimpse of something pleasant. There must be planets that are rather nice, or something that makes fighting worth it. If there is nothing worth defending, then why fight at all?

That's kinda the original point of the setting. That there's nothing pleasant and the whole universe existed to grind out optimism and hope from existence.

It started as a big joke, where literally everything was utterly and completely crapsack and nothing could ever get better, purely because that would make it so over the top and ridiculous in scale that people couldn't help but not take it seriously. Just look at it. You've got walking death cathedrals, an entire species of football hooligans, anything and everything in existence can and will be infested by Chaos, and the fucking Space Nazis are the good guys. It's so absurd that it can't possibly have started from a serious premise.

Unfortunately, cultural attitudes shifted a bit shortly after it was created, and people started taking it seriously. And once that happened, it just spiraled away into the cesspit that it (mostly) is now. Caiaphas Cain is pretty much the only aspect of the fluff that still remembers its roots.