Web Animation / Space King

Praise be.

"...an original Flashgitz series! Which our lawyer has told us to tell you has absolutely nothing to do with Warhammer. I swear. Enjoy."

— A Black Templar, The Furry Bait-N-Switch

Neuro Pilgrimage Commence

A sci-fi action comedy by Flash-Gitz Animation. The show is concerned with the violent, dysfunctional empire of the titular (and absent) Space King as it attempts to bring an even more dangerous and insane universe around it to heel while searching for its lost monarch.

It's totally not based on Warhammer 40,000, but if it was, it would be a spiritual successor to Flashgitz's previous fan animations about that franchise. But it isn't, so it's not.

The pilot episode of the series can be seen here.

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Praise be to Space Tropes:

• A Dog Named "Dog": The Captain's Sweatshop merch special reveals that Hatemonger isn't just his callsign but the name of his very legion.
• Absolute Xenophobe: Seems to be the hat of the Hatemongers legion. The lone Hatemonger in Captain's squad is the only one not transfixed by the alien queen's boobs, on the grounds that she's an alien (to the sniggering of the rest of the team). In the Captain's Sweatshop ad short, Captain claims that the Hatemongers condemned the production of the promotional t-shirts as "heresy", since the Star Defenders are using captive aliens for materials.
• Affectionate Parody: The short could be seen as a parody of sci-fi settings, particularly ones with Testosterone Poisoned Super Soldiers who follow a Scary Amoral Religion.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Bryce is part of a genocidal organization and he helps his allies attack the Alien Queen but when he's killed by her he has a somewhat heartfelt moment with Captain before he succumbs to his injuries.
• All for Nothing: After Bryce and Hatemonger are killed trying to get the Female Alien to relinquish the Artifact's power, they manage to do so until Captain drops a grenade into the hole the Alien and her babies fled into, causing her to leap out in anger... and force Chestnut to shoot her head off. This causes her headless body to fall over and crash into the Artifact, dropping it onto Captain and killing him while breaking the Artifact, causing the team's efforts to be all for naught.
• The All-Solving Hammer: Captain is real quick with the Genocide Bombs, which is becoming such a headache for High Command that he gets banned from using them.
• And I Must Scream: In "Captain's Sweatshop", Captain went over a species of metal men whose souls remain trapped in their bodies regardless of the abuse they get. He demonstrated this by crushing one of them with giant mallets, then stated that it's a method that he uses to make the aglets for the promotional hoodies. Shortly afterwards the camera zooms into one of said aglets, which was letting out a faint screaming sound.
• Anyone Can Die: Given the show's (completely theoretical) influences, this is still very much in effect.
• Asshole Victim: Captain and Hatemonger are killed off but given they were genocidal xenophobic psychopaths (who were also massive jerks to their own teammates) and the Alien Queen was genuinely reasonably and trying to care for her children, their deaths are entirely karmic.
• Atop A Mountain Of Bodies: The main reclaimer squad of the Star Defenders are introduced this way along with dozens of their battle brothers.
• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: When facing the Alien Queen, the Star Defenders charge her from two directions, with Hatemonger serving as a distraction so Captain and Bryce don't get enthralled be her boobs again. Hatemonger gets killed within five seconds, prompting the other two to panic and retreat back behind pillar.
  Captain: Let's go! SPACE KIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGG!
  (He and Bryce charge the queen from the right, while Hatemonger attacks her from the left. Heroic music plays. Hatemonger is promptly zapped, and the music stops.)
  Captain: Oh fuck! Go back! Go back!
• Authority Sounds Deep: Captain's voice isn't so much gravelly as it is boulder-y. Whenever he starts yelling, it sounds like he's a Death Metal vocalist.
  • Averted by High Command, who is downright shrill despite being the size of a house.
• Badass Biker: A Star Defender astride a huge motorcycle appears during the opening battle, managing to land his rear wheel directly on top of an alien soldier and pulverize his foe with a quick rev of his engine before speeding off.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • High Command chews out the squad over them needlessly wiping out a densely populated planet with a genocide bomb. Specifically, over them wasting a valuable genocide bomb. The fact that 20 billion people died over what amounts to Captain's fit of pique doesn't even come up.
  • Captain, moved by Bryce's appeal to try and accomplish their mission without resorting to a genocide bomb despite how cool it would be, thanks his teammate for his counsel and seemingly begins to key in the code to reactivate the Star Defender's radios. Only for his computer to cheerfully announce "Geno-Bomb Online!" as his squad panics and attempts to restrain him.
  • During the "Captain's Sweatshop" short promoting tie-in clothing, Captain cheerily went over how the materials of the shirts were acquired from abusing an alien species. Then after going over how the aglets for the hoodies are made:
    Captain: (in a threatening tone) And for those CRYBABIES among you who wants to know what happens to an alien (grabs the camera) once it lived out its usefulness... (calmly as the camera cuts to a serene meadow with aliens sitting around) they're sent to this beautiful field to live out the remainder of their lives.
    • And then that gets bait-and-switched as Captain messes up his subsequent line, then cuts right back to the meadow as he beheads all those aliens.
• Boob-Based Gag: The Alien queen has comically large breasts bigger than her entire torso which cause the Star Defenders to be awestruck (Besides Hatemonger).
• Celibate Hero: A tapestry of the Space King depicts him shielding his eyes whilst he combats dozens of scantily clad alien temptresses.
• Character Development: Captain begrudgingly learns a degree of temperance, and how to respect the thoughts and feelings of his battle brothers, even bringing himself to be more open about how much he actually values them. And so he dies a better man than he started the episode as.
• Decoy Protagonist:
  • Captain is portrayed as the leader of the Space Defenders and central character of the pilot...until he dies when Space King's statue falls onto him, crushing his entire upper body.
  • The pilot begins following a boy taken for conversion into a Star Defender, undergoing the enhancement process and being deployed into his first battle with a special assignment from High Command. Then his drop pod gets shot down, at which point we meet up with Captain and the reclaimer squad. Grievously wounded, he manages to re-enter the plot just long enough to drag himself to Captain and deliver a message before bleeding out. He reappears one last time when Captain offers up one of his Holy Globules to the female alien.
• Defiant to the End: The blue alien king may have been overpowered by the much larger Star Defenders, mercilessly beaten, interrogated and had a dubious translator device jammed into his skull, but the moment his foes don't have him physically restrained he pulls a gun and fires one last defiant blast right into Captain's crotch.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Captain gets so furious that he attempts to call in a Genocide Bomb to kill all 20 billion aliens on the planet they're on...purely because the dying alien king shot him in the crotch and slightly chipped his armor.
• Ditzy Genius: Bryce is smart enough to create a translator that would allow him to understand alien languages, but is just the right amount of stupid to jam the device directly into a target's skull causing them to let out nothing apart from now comprehensible screams.
• Downer Ending: The pilot episodes ends with most of the squad dying, and Chestnut accidentally breaking the artifact by shooting the Female Alien, causing her headless body to collapse into it, sending the Artifact crashing into the floor onto Captain (which kills him) and destroying the piece of the Space King's soul in it in the process.
• Expressive Mask: The helmets of the characters can can change expressions, with their visors even lining up with their wearers eye movements.
• The Faceless: Hatemonger is the only member of the reclaimer squad whose face we never see. His helmets mouth/visor is very small and high up, so even when it's open his face is completely hidden.
• Expy: Given this is a parody of Warhammer 40,000 a lot of the characters resemble the characters from there, with the Legionaires essentially being the Space Marines.
  • Both the Space King and the High Command are based off the Emperor of Mankind, the Space King being a living legend the Legionaires venerate and the High Command being a skeletal figure bolted to a wall connect to a bunch of tubes which is the current state of the Emperor of Mankind.
  • Chestnut's Legion is based off the Apothecaries given his green and white color scheme and recovering the Globules from fallen Legionaires like how the Apothecaries recover gene-seeds from dead Space Marines.
  • Bryce is based on a Techmarine give he is a Gadgeteer Genius and also appears to be cybernetically enhanced with his eye.
  • The Noseless blue aliens the Legionaires slaughter in the beginning resemble the Tau.
  • The Alien Queen seems to be based on the Tyranids with her visceral insectoid design as well as Chaos Daemons due to her kin living in another dimension.
  • The metal men whose souls remain trapped in their bodies are a clear reference to the Necrons.
• Fan Disservice: While the uncensored version of the pilot does feature uncovered alien boobs, it also contains an extended close up of Hatemonger's freakishly deformed penis. Small wonder Chestnut has to dry heave after touching it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: As can be seen for a split second when Captain offers one up to the Female Alien, a Star Defender's personal profile is printed on their globules. This includes their "Last Birth", which may imply a form of implant-based Resurrective Immortality. The specific globule being shown belongs to "Xavery", the Decoy Protagonist of the opening sequence.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Chestnut. Not even Space King apparently likes him, calling him a "worthless piece of shit". Considering that he ends up sabotaging the operation and making the team's efforts All for Nothing in the end, there may be a good reason for this.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Bryce manages to build a pocket sized universal translator to help speed the reclaimer squads efforts. Unfortunately he's very much a Ditzy Genius too, and the translator has a massive, crippling design flaw.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Subverted. While the Leigionaires feel no guilt over committing genocide, their targets are not Always Chaotic Evil and only are attacking the Legionaires out of self-defense.
• Groin Attack: The transformation process for a Legionaire involves a young boy having his testicles replaced with "Holy Globules".
• Have You Seen My God?: Or God-Emperor in this case. The Space King vanished for unknown reasons and part of the goal of his men is to find him.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Inverted, given their design it's doubtful that Psycho Armor helmets can come off at all. The "mouth" can snap open and shut like an unnecessarily large visor, which reveals there's a good foot or so of clearance above the soldiers head inside.
• He-Man Woman Hater: While they round up little boys to be converted into Star Defenders, any little girls they catch are put in a sack and tossed into a volcano instead of being simply ignored. Later, a mural depicting Space King shows him shielding his eyes as he sets fire to scantly-clad alien temptresses. This seems to stem from the Star Defenders being mentally immature, as Captain and his squad (with the exception of Hatemonger) are transfixed by the sight of a giant alien woman with giant boobs.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: The Alien flashes her enormous breasts at the Star Defenders, causing 3 out of 4 of them to be enamored.
• Imagine Spot: While the Star Defenders are being harangued for their latest screwup by High Command, they all drift off and imagine Space King speaking to them individually and assuring each of them that their mindset is the correct one that he most approves of. Save for Chestnut, who only gets called a "worthless piece of shit" to his own disappointment.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: An alien soldier gets a battle standard hurled at him like a javelin, which nails him square in the face and pins his corpse to the ground.
• Jaw Drop: Done by Captain's armor in reaction to learning he's invaded the wrong planet. Right after he ordered a genocide bomb dropped on it.
• Jump Scare: Opens on one. A young boy is sleeping peacefully in his bed when a Star Defender explodes through his wall, bellowing "LITTLE BOY" at the top of his lungs, and drags him off.
• Just the First Citizen: In the absence of the Space King, the empire is being run by High Command, a giant robotic skull.
• Karmic Death: Captain is killed shortly after he threw a grenade at the Alien Queen and her children, even after the Alien queen returned the Space King's essence back to the relic. Had he just left her alone she wouldn't have attacked him and caused his death.
• Large and in Charge: If the suit of armor artifact containing part of his soul is of any indication, Space King was several times larger than his already enormous troops.
  • High Command is similarly immense in scale, being so massive that the Legionnaires would barely be able to touch his bottom teeth if they stood at his chin.
• Meaningful Name: Chestnut collects the "globules" of his fallen comrades and put them in a compartment on his chest.
• Metaphorically True: Aliens that are retired from the Star Defenders' apparel-producing factories do indeed live out the rest of their lives in a peaceful, beautiful meadow. Captain didn't take them out of it before killing them, after all.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: The alien king chipping a tiny piece off his armor causes Captain to drop a Genocide Bomb on their world, which will wipe out all 20 billion inhabitants.
• Mistaken for Gay: Captain assumes Hatemonger is gay because he was the only one unaffected by the Female Alien's gigantic... weapons. Hatemonger denies this by saying he just hates aliens, no matter how attractive they are.
  Captain: I mean me too, but... (points at Female Alien swinging her "weapons" around) Come on.
• Nerd Glasses: Bryce's helmet has big round eyes evoking coke bottle glasses.
• No Kill like Overkill: Captain has a bad habit of dropping Genocide Bombs at the drop of a hat to the repeated chagrin of both his squad mates and High Command.
• No-Sell: A massive barrage of concentrated fire from a team of alien soldiers against the Star Defenders does little more than alert the invaders to their presence, demonstrating how incredibly tough their Psycho Armor is against most weaponry. Which makes it all the more shocking when Hatemonger gets his entire upper body vaporized without even a hint of resistance.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The Alien Queen only wanted to negotiate with the Legionaires to bring herself and her children back to the dimension her kin was from. She only attacks them once they attack her first, and even gives back the soul of the Space King back into the aftifact. Not that it stops Captain from blowing her up afterwards.
• Noodle Incident: Hatemonger joined the Star Defenders, because he's on the outs with his Legion due to some kind of disagreement with his fondness for statistics.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: Hatemonger is the only one of the squad not mesmerized by the Female Alien's breasts, which makes him a formidable asset to fighting her. Until he gets his entire upper half vaporized by one of her beams.
• Oh, Crap!: Captain retracts his visor to show us his horrified expression when he hears from High Command that the planet he's genociding in an all-out war isn't even the right one.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Star Defenders are notably spooked when Hatemonger, the most xenophobic one amongst them, says they shouldn't kill the Alien Queen.
• Painful Transformation: Even if the "applicant" wasn't screaming in pain and fear the whole time, it's clear that becoming a Legionnaire is a mighty unpleasant experience.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The Legionnaires behave like moody, hormonal teenagers when they aren't slaughtering their way across the stars. Which makes sense, being that they're legions of preteen boys converted into roided-out killing machines. Highlighted when Captain responds to being banned from committing genocide like he just lost his computer privileges for a week.
  Captain: "What?! That's so unfair!" (stamps his foot childishly)
• Punny Name: Chestnut has a container for his fallen comrades Holy Globules, or their "nuts", on his chest.
• Rage Helm: Exaggerated. The helmets of psycho armor suits are designed to resemble enormous snarling faces, with the clenched teeth of the scowl being a retractable visor.
• Reforged into a Minion: How the Star Defenders are made from kidnapped boys.
• Resurrective Immortality: It's implied by both the creators and a merch sticker that the Legionaries can be resurrected via transferring their Holy Globules into another applicant.
• Screaming Warrior: The standard battle cry among the Star Defenders is a sustained, wordless, chesty roar.
• Skull for a Head: High Command is nothing but a gargantuan robotic skull. Also, the motif of Chestnut's helmet.
• The Smart Guy:
  • Bryce seems to be the team's main tech guy, inventing a translating device in addition to having an upgraded weapon compared to the rest of the Legionnaires. He was also the first member to suggest that they need to negotiate with the Alien Queen rather than trying to win a fight they couldn't.
  • Hatemonger is mentioned to have a fascination with statistics, is well-studied enough to know the history and nature of the artifact they find, and is quick to deduce potential threats or difficulties for his comrades. He's also the natural choice for interrogating capture foes, but being that he's still a Legionnaire, his idea of "interrogating" is punching his captive in the face and screaming questions at them in a language they don't speak.
• Space Marine: The Star Defenders are an interstellar army of supersoldiers decked out in Power Armor with multiple chapters devoted to different tasks, and that are in no way based on the Adeptus Astartes.
• Surrounded by Idiots: High Command does not have a high opinion of the Star Defenders' intelligence, treating them more like insolent and stupid teenagers than legions of bloodthirsty and psychotic super soldiers. This is not entirely inaccurate.
• Super-Scream: The amplified war cry of a Star Defender Humongous Mecha liquefies a squad of alien soldiers.
• Survivor's Guilt: Chestnut is implied to suffer from this, given that his version of Space King speaking to him calls him a "worthless piece of shit" and by the end of the pilot he's the sole survivor, somberly collecting the Holy Globules of his fallen teammates. It may not have been the first time he went through the same song and dance and wound up being the Sole Survivor instead of dying in the glory of battle like his brothers, thus feeling less worthy than them.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Bryce creates a translation device that, when connected to an alien's skull, allows them understand what it is saying. However, the alien starts screaming in agony due to the huge needle piercing his brain instead of saying anything useful, making the device completely useless.
• Stupid Evil: Captain hates Aliens so much he is willing to genocide an entire planet which gets him reprimanded for wasting resources especially since the planet wasn't their original target. He also throws a bomb at the alien after she kept her end of the bargain and was planning on staying out of their way, leading to her attacking him and causing his death.
• Take That!: The creators describe most other original animated series on YouTube as "independent animation targeted at mentally ill teenaged girls" (right before describing their own target demographic as "mentally ill teenaged boys and thirty-year old men") while a Composite Character sharing design motifs from Helluva Boss and The Amazing Digital Circus awkwardly stands between them. They also take cracks at modern Hollywood media in general, or as they summarize, "the lamest shit possible", while Star Defenders ransack the Hollywood sign at Mount Lee.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Figuratively and literally, as the procedure of creating Star Defenders is implied to involve replacing a boy's testicles with "Holy Globules" that turn them into muscle-bound ragemonkeys (while retaining the overall mindset of prepubescent boys engaging in a power fantasy).
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: High Command chews out the Space Defenders for being incompentent.
  High Command: You're in so much trouble! Not only do you have one of the worst artifact recovery rates of any reclaimer squad in the galaxy, now you're wasting precious geno-bombs too!... Space King will return to us when we've proven our worth! It's no wonder Space King left. Hell, I would have left too if I had you as my sons! Going around the galaxy, doing nothing important...
• Torpedo Tits: A variation; The alien that the squad fights in the pilot is able to shoot lasers from her tits after absorbing Space King's power.
• Torso with a View: How Bryce meets his end, after a laser from the Alien Queen is shot through his chest.
• Tyke-Bomb: The Star Defenders legion is created by kidnapping young boys and injecting them with "Holy Globules" that turn them into roided-out Super Soldiers within seconds.
• Villain Protagonist: The Star Defenders are a bunch of genocidal psychopaths, Captain being the most dickish of the bunch.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Bryce, relative to the other legionnaires anyway. He's more likely to counsel against unnecessarily excessive violence, even if he thinks its pretty sweet, and likes suggesting innovative or unorthodox strategies.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Legions recruit new soldiers by raiding worlds for young boys to alter and indoctrinate. Young girls instead get tossed into a volcano.
  • After the Female Alien returns to her lair to feed her babies, Captain is quick to drop a grenade in to blow the lot up. This presumably kills her babies, as she leaps out for revenge.
• Your Answer to Everything:
  • Captain's response to any personal indignity or battlefield obstacle is to drop a genocide bomb on it.
  • Bryce's solution to dealing with aliens is to use his translator device.

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Memories Sanctified