YMMV / Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K

• Arc Fatigue: The Second Battle of Axum suffers from this, dragging on longer than even the author admits he had expected it would. For comparison, the first contact battle near Pzob, the Battle of Anaxes, and the First Battle of Axum all occur within Season 1. The first contact battle and the Battle of Anaxes are both covered in the span of 2-3 episodes each, while the First Battle of Axum happens entirely offscreen in between Episodes 8–9. The Second Battle of Axum? More than forty episodes spread out throughout Seasons 2, 3, and 4.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • A popular fan theory is that Gaphin, the Jedi Padawan who sacrificed himself to help Dr. Shina escape the Honor Hound in Season 1, wasn't killed by the Skywatch but instead captured and made a Space Marine aspirant since he is mentioned to be around the age that aspirants are selected at. This is despite the fact that Space Marine Chapters usually recruit from loyal and well-indoctrinated Imperial populations, whereas Gaphin would at best be viewed as an unsanctioned psyker servicing a hostile xeno government.
  • After the author confirmed that the Chaos entity which corrupted 65 and his clones into a berserker frenzy in Episode 22 was not Khorne, a recurring fan theory is that the entity's true identity is Kad Ha'rangir, the Mandalorian Destroyer Deity from the Legends continuity.
• Evil Is Cool: The Imperium are unequivocally the bad guys, but come on, it's the Imperium of Man.
• Growing the Beard: The first three episodes of the series are generally considered decent but pretty standard fare for a fanfic. The fourth episode is widely viewed as better but still not a game changer. Then comes Episode 5, which received the second most views on YouTube out of the entire series due to being Bloodier and Gorier and portraying the Space Marines as being like horror movie villains from the perspectives of a Republic science team. It's also after this episode that more canon Star Wars characters step in and replace the OCs on the Republic's side.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Palpatine ordering a hyperspace ram upon an Imperial refugee ship, starting the war between the Imperium and the Republic.
  • Davik Thune crosses it during the razing of Utapau in Episode 32. While Thune has never been one to shy away from committing atrocities, up until this point they were usually targeted towards military targets like Anaxes and villainous factions like the CIS, while Thune himself was generally indifferent to civilian casualties. But here, he outright invades a neutral world (albeit one that was coerced by the CIS into having a droid factory), and after destroying Utapau's droid factory he goes about slaughtering all the planet's native inhabitants. But what truly marks this action as well and truly irredeemable is the excessively gratuitous way he goes about it. He doesn't use orbital bombardment or Exterminatus to grant everyone on Utapau a quick death like most Imperial commanders who were just doing their jobs would have done. Instead he and his Crimson Razors make the deaths of the Utapauans as slow and drawn out as possible to inflict maximum terror upon them before their deaths. He burns their cities and forces the civilians to flee out into Utapau's deadly environment where the planet's razor-like winds slice up their flesh for hours. Then, Thune has his Marines capture and drag back all the Utapauans to literally cannibalize them as part of a sick victory feast. The Crimson Razors devour the Utapauans headfirst while they are still alive, and then form piles of corpses to set on fire.
• Nightmare Fuel: All over the place given its a 40k story.
  • The ending of Episode 45 where it seems like Rex is slowly turning to Chaos.
  • The end credits revealing that Tzeentch and Slaanesh are in cahoots and are working something in the SW universe, all set to the charmingly unsettling "They're Only Human" from Death Note: The Musical.
• Rooting for the Empire: TONS of viewers are rooting for the Imperium to win, due to a combination of aesthetics, determination, and just being cool as hell. It also doesn't hurt that the Imperium regularly shows its more noble side (alongside its less noble one), while the Jedi Order and the Republic slowly shed theirs in an ever more fanatical drive to defeat the Imperium.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: After Nerva and Kallak's squad spend Season 2 trying to get to the Imperial Knight Faithful Flame with most of the squad dying in the process, and Nerva has her Battle in the Center of the Mind with the Faithful Flame's machine spirit, she only gets to pilot the Imperial Knight for a few episodes before the mech gets totaled by Ahsoka crash landing Trench's flagship right on top of it and Nerve is thrown into a coma. More than a few viewers were let down that after all the build-up, Nerva barely got to pilot her Imperial Knight for the Battle of Axum.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Suffice it to say that no one expected for Ciaphas Cain to show up on Tatooine. Aside from the Xek-Tek Sector being insulted and fairly isolated from the wider Imperium even before getting transported to the Star Wars galaxy, Cain is believed to have died of natural causes by M42.
  • Iskandar Khayon showing up as a prisoner of Tahr Whyler was also unexpected considering that his last canon appearance had him imprisoned on Holy Terra after surrendering to the Inquisition, while the Xek-Tek Sector where the Imperials in this series hail from is considered isolated and remote compared to the rest of the Imperium.

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