Why do the DEATHWING have FEATHERS? A Dark Angels Retrospective | Warhammer 40,000

hi gang here's a question for you why do the Dark Angels Deathwing have feathers it's not why you think it's a question that goes back to the early history of Warhammer 40K and shows just how much it's changed in the last 40 [Music] years as I write this a new box set for Warhammer 40,000 is about to be released Deathwing assault featuring The Elite of the Dark Angels chapter of Space Marines and if you look closely at some of the bits you'll see a recurring Motif little pendants made of feathers these little pendants have been seen on Deathwing Terminators through multiple revisions of their models including this one thanks Warhammer and feathers and wings pop up across the Dark Angels range even though they're not something you'd necessarily expect when you think about the the dark Angel's particular theme in Warhammer 40K Space Marine chapters are kind of a blank canvas for people to apply various themes to but one of the most common and popular themes is space kns and the Dark Angels are one of the most space nightly their design and backstory are influenced by everything from Arthurian quests to secretive nightly orders swords robes nightly helmets Catholic stuff you get the idea but their Elite first company the Deathwing clad in bone white Terminator armor also have these little feathers and at first glance that might seem obvious why look look at the dark angel symbol it's a heavily stylized winged sword they're holy Angelic space Knights and angels have wings that's obviously where the feathers come from Right video over but no because the origins of the feathers goes back to before the Dark Angels were space Knights to when they had a whole different theme so let's look back through the history of the the Dark Angels in wammer 40K and find out how they changed the Dark Angels were one of the original Space Marine chapters listed in 1987's Rogue Trader the very first edition of Warhammer 40K when this was written there were no primarch no Horus heresy there wasn't even any chaos and yet they're one of the chapters with some information given in a box out we find out about their ancient ritual the Feast of the malediction dedicated to their founder ly L gonson and which requires the pres you cut their hands dip their blood into a cup mix it all up with some wine and drink it which is pretty normal Space Marine behavior for the time tame really students of English literature might have noted the name which was a reference Lynn elgon is a reference to the English romantic poet Lionel Johnson whose most famous work was called the dark angel I've got a whole video where I go through all the references present in things like Primark names so if you like that sort of thing go to that but to be really quick lonel Johnson was gay something that was considered a great sin in the 1800s when he lived and it was considered that by Johnson himself who was a devout Catholic and deeply ashamed of it the dark angel is about his personal torture being both of those things but that's not relevant quite yet to our story in 1987 you get the impression that Rick Priestley just needed to come up with some chapters and some names and threw in the barely disguised Lyn l gonson of the Dark Angels as a little literary in joke the only other info we have is that they live on a space Fortress that orbits the planet Deon and they wear only black with the occasional red stripe this is shown in some art but any more law would come in the form of white dwarf articles as the universe was then slowly expanded over the next few years in issue 96 of white dwarf from December 1987 we get an article on the new Space Marine jet bite models and we find out about the ren Wing number seven company is a specialized Recon and attack company known as The Raven wing Wing equipped and trained for highspeed reconnaissance The Raven Wing specializes in Hit and Run Warfare and Search and Destroy missions and we also find out a little about the chapter's past the chapter's early history was removed from all Imperial records following the Horus heresy and the banishment of the nine tracher Legions to the eye of Terror and while there were some stories of the exploratory achievements of their founder here called Lionel Johnson or jobson they were probably all made up after the heresy and for 1987 that's all we get we've got the chapter clad in Black their Divergent 7eventh company or mounted on bikes and the rumor that their history was lost following the heresy and after this the Dark Angels were last for about a year but in 1989 they returned to prominence with the release of the Space Marine game Space Marine was one of the first releases for the new epic system and was set in that Horus heresy we just spoke about the cover is this iconic piece of art by Jim Burns known to history as Scarface marine and as as you can see battle brother Pacino here is wearing a fetching dark green Ensemble which is now listed as the official color scheme there's a rough painting guide in the rule book that lists salamander's green as one of the main colors I have no idea what the reasoning for that was it was likely just changed because the painting was that color but whatever from this point on Dark Angels are green the Space Marine rule book also featured this iconic spread with the early story of lman Russ of the Space Wolves which required talking about their f rivalry with the Dark Angels and by this point the Realms of chaos books have been released which had introduced the idea of primar what's the name of the Primark of the Dark Angels well it's finally settled to Lion l Johnson possibly the silliest option we've heard so far and really close to the original reference but anyway so far no feathers the real answer to our question Comes A year later in 1990 with the release of the space Hulk expans expansion Deathwing Deathwing was an expansion for the first edition of spacehulk with new weapons and New Missions and a new story a short story that goes through the whole of this rule supplement written by Bill King and Brian anel the first company of the Dark Angels chapter was introduced along with a load of backstory on them and The Wider chapter the story itself is pretty chunky it's a good quarter to a third of the rule book and it was republished as a short story a few times the last was actually in 2013 so it's still I guess semiofficial but we'll get to how later in the story The Dark Angel Sergeant Ezekiel not that one returns with a squad of Terminators to the chapter home world a world referred to in this as PLS world where they root out a gene stealer infestation the culture of this PLS world is pretty obviously influenced by real world Native American culture the planes World inhabitants live in tribes and build lodges their young Warriors go out to count coup and the Marines landing on their old home World switch from their adopted Dark Angel names like Ezekiel and Gabriel to their original priestes names two heads talking cloud Runner lame bear discovering the gene steal of corruption they decide to stay and embrace the rituals of their people painting their armor bone white the color of death when the spirit that carries them to the afterlife and the name of the drop ship the Dark Angels use for these recruitment missions when the Marines succeed they stay to rebuild and when the rest of the Dark Angels come looking they take back the Terminator suits but leave them bone white in honor of the great number of Marines that sacrificed themselves to protect the ancient home world and that's why the Deathwing are painted white and over the next few years this story inspired more Dark Angels modelers we got this selection of models from Rob Baker in heavy metal clear clearly inspired by the fluff in the Deathwing supplement he painted his Dark Angels Terminators in bone with look little sculpted feathers as part of the whole Native American theme and as the next couple of years rolled on the rest of the general dark Angel's law was solidified a bit Dark Angels now wore green their veteran company was called the Deathwing and wore bone white and their second company now was called The Raven wing all mounted on bikes and wearing black the only existing law about their culture was from that Deathwing short story their home world had at some point been a Plains World which Games Workshop had given a Native American theme but also back in the heresy all their records were lost for some reason and that was it the feather Motif stayed through the release of the classic Dark Angels captain in 1991 look at that headdress to the release of the box set of metal Deathwing Terminators in 1993 who continued it with these little feather totems tied to all their weapons and that was your Dark Angels for the first 10 years the big change wouldn't come until a few years later way into second edition the Codex imperialist book the sort of background and best the book for second edition gave us a bit more info on that dodgy past in a box out only the legend persists the legend that once the Dark Angels teet upon the brink of chaos that foul betrayal besched The chapter's Valor and made vain all acts of former virtue yet they returned to the fold of The Emperor's love and tore themselves from the very bosom of Temptation perhaps they sought the emperor's pardon too late forever since they borne the mark of The Unforgiven so expanding on that lost records thing but it feels like a sneak preview of the change to come because in 1996 the Dark Angels changed forever with the release of codex angels of death a combined Dark Angels and blood angels codex and the third Space Marine codex of second edition in this we get the Dark Angels we know today their home world is neither the planet deah or the plains world but the planet calaban where their primar was found leading a group of questing knights known as the order who became the cultural influence for the Dark Angels Legion and then chapter the Dark Angels are therefore portrayed as an extremely secretive order of monastic medieval knights clad in Monks habits coming from a long line of questing Monster Hunters during the heresy part of the Legion turned traitor and the resulting battle destroyed caliban but the Dark Angels covered it all up leading to their self ire status of The Unforgiven destined to constantly hunt for the Fallen Angels who sided with Luther that's why they have the ravenwing to do the hunting they do this from The Rock their mobile Fortress Monastery the only surviving part of their own home world all pretty familiar now but it was a really big change loads of this is just completely new interrogator chaplains the Fallen caliban the secrecy and inner orders all of that was invented just for this book some elements of the previous fluff have been been folded in the biblical names were retained in all new characters like Azrael and Ezekiel and the idea that they did something wrong during the heresy the old spacebound fortress Monastery that was in the very first mention as well as the general organizational stuff the white Deathwing the black raven wing and the green regular chapter but the culture is totally different from what they've been the old Plains World Native American thing was pretty much jettison Wholesale in favor of this new monastic night look and though the story of how the Deathwing got their bone white armor was kept the culture of the Plains world was left out so why the change the Catholic space Knights ashamed of their nature and seeking to atone for their sins certainly fits the original reference to Lionel Johnson but I think the reasons are probably more practical than that Space Marines as space medieval knights was a concept that had been hanging around the lore for a while though not nearly as prominently as it is today and it probably had more mass Market appeal than the Native American look and crucially none of the other big four chapters that had second edition codexes had used it the ultramarines had very recently been codified as space Romans the Space Wolves were space Vikings and the blood angels already had a bunch of Renaissance vampire tropes and the black Templars that slightly different sort of medieval night chapter hadn't really been developed yet they wouldn't appear as medieval Crusaders until third Edition a few years later so for whatever reason the Dark Angels just got a facelift going from a Native American themed chapter to a monastic night themed one and the feathers that have been all over the models since the Native American days were just kept Justified as part of the Angelic symbolism of the chapter and this was carried forward all the way until today in the following decades the Horus heresy series would create alternate justifications for the color schemes the novels detailed how the original Dark Angels still wore black but changed their armor to green after they found the lion in honor of the forests of calaban and in the Horus heresy game there's already a Deathwing all the way back then and the Black Books explain the tradition of Warriors painting armor panels bone white in recognition of taking a mortal wound meant for someone else and that's where the white armor comes from which you could still argue ties in with the original fluff white armor to denote a great loss that's what the Deathwing suffered there are more additions too the return of the lion gave the Dark Angels a bit more of an Arthurian theme they had before but the fluff from 1996 is recognizably what we still have today and the old story of ples world and the gene stealer infestation is pretty much gone but you can still find traces of it here and there in the more recent codexes the Battle of two heads talking is referenced listed as an apocryphal Tale the sort of story told to new initiates to warn them about the dangers of betrayal from within without actually giving away any of the dark Angel's real secrets and the feather thing has remained in fact been adopted more as a general part of the Dark Angels on the hassar style penants of the ravenwing on the Colossal hats of Dark Angels captains and Veterans and right where they began dangling from the armor of the Deathwing a reinterpretation of that old concept now just another way we symbolize that they're angels all of this is a great example of how Warhammer updates and changes itself to appeal to new players at multiple times in its history Games Workshop have looked at a range of models or a section of the law and just gone nah maybe we should redo that and make them something else either because the original design seemed silly in retrospect or they thought it had nowhere to go or they thought something else would sell better or because times had changed and what was once thought acceptable wasn't anymore it's one of the ways the game's kept relevant and one of the reasons it's been around this long but with all of these in there somewhere there is some callbacks to the Old Law some little thread that excuses the change a bit like the apocryphal story of two heads talking or the feathers on the very latest Deathwing Terminators thanks for watching and if you'd like to hear more about the history of 40K and how it's changed over time well there should be a video just coming up to the right and if you'd like to support the channel like subscribe or join the patreon where you can get early videos and vote on what we do next in our book club see [Music] you

Channel: Arbitor Ian

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Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024