The theme tie in could have been executed a little more crisper but... this! This is the kind of fundamental fleshing out of lore that OPR needs to thrive! And I'll accept nothing less than this quality, either. It was dramatic, so grim, hopeless, so dark and stuffed with that "I have to know what happened" energy that lore overviews will never reproduce.
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The theme was an awkward stumbling block. The lore demanded the story be told. Who am I to deny the call. I don't like that OPR Grim Dark is often called grim grey, and 40k is called grim dark. The thing that makes it grim and dark is how miserable and brutal life in space just naturally is, and how awful and hopeless galaxy-spanning conflicts are. 40k manufactures the grim dark. OPR Grim Dark leaves room for people to fall in love, raise a family, or work on a farm. But then there are conflicts like this in space that just are naturally grimmer and darker than our worst nightmares. And the potential for beauty in this universe that is completely absent from any other grim dark literature makes the grim darkness so much darker. There is so much more height to climb and so much further to fall in this universe. Other grim dark universes are so 2 dimentsional. I just wanted to add some dimensionality and possibility to the OPR, a university brimming with potential.
And also my whole plan was that the story would be close enough to the OPR version. The OPR version was awkward at best as far as I can tell. So I tried to claim the OPR version was just the version that was told thousands of years later. It’s not the truth but it’s close enough. My story is the truth!