The Ragged Edges is a long-running Warhammer 40,000 fan project created by Mr. Culexus (also known as the creator of Cultist-chan), born out of various /tg/ discussions. Initially created to provide a mentor for Commissar Fuklaw, it took on a life of its own, with its creator diligently working to encompass fanfiction, fanart, a Quest, and a Character Blog - even canonizing stories written by other people.
The series centers around the titular group, a group of Ordo Xenos soldiers created primarily from the remnants of various Imperial Guard regiments. The primary characters are Conrad Raege, a disgraced commissar, and Alice Boone, a low-grade psyker, with many others assuming the spotlight at points. It follows the adventures and interactions of the group, over the course of a lengthy run of service.
The main materials are Culexus's own artwork
, Boone Quest, the askblog, and a take written by fellow 40k fan Staffen.
The overall project provides examples of:
- Anachronic Order: The story is basically told through small snippets of a campaign that lasted a few decades, which come out in basically any order.
- Army of Thieves and Whores: Downplayed; while all the Edges are actual Imperial Guardsmen, a lot of them have decidedly shady pasts.
- Art Evolution: Compare the flat colors and weird anatomy of the original pinups to the more detailed shading and clearer style of the modern stuff.
- Badass Crew: Pretty much any one of the Edges would have been one of the best soldiers in their old regiments. As a unit, they can take on stuff far more dangerous than you'd expect a few dozen Guardsmen to be able to.
- Beta Couple: Though "Conralice" is the main relationship of the story, smaller, considerably less-dysfunctional pairups have occurred since then, including Myers/Wesk, Cuddles/Redding, and Minhelm/Yaroslava.
- Breakout Character: The original intent of Raege's character was to proved a mentor for /tg/ meme character Commissar Fuklaw. The connection between the two remains, despite the Edges mythos having evolved in a considerably different direction.
- Broad Strokes: The Elite-Pirate stories are stated to be mostly accurate, but it's implied that elements of them didn't happen (for instance, Angela and Branz didn't get together).
- Canon Discontinuity: The early story "Boone's First Time" was removed from Deviantart, due to just about everyone involved being Out of Character and the whole thing overall being poorly-written. It's been referenced in Broad Strokes since then, though. Some of the earlier artwork involving the team was also dismissed as being an In-Universe bad drawing.
- Cast Full of Gay: At this point, it'd probably be easier to name the characters who aren't somewhere on the Kinsey scale.
- Character Blog: Ask The Ragged Edges.
- Dysfunction Junction: As one might expect from the team's origin, nearly every character has some variety of personal or psychological issue.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The earliest artwork was considerably goofier and more comedic, and most of the characters had different personalities from what they ended up with.
- Fanservice: Plenty of the characters were originally created as part of a pinup project, and the story still often dives into that.
- Four-Temperament Ensemble: The main quartet of the series - Conrad is melancholic, Alice is sanguine, Zune is phlegmatic, and Cuddles is choleric.
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Hypothetical Casting: A fairly extensive one on the askblog - for both English and Japanese, even. - Improbably Female Cast: Probably the only Imperial Guard story you're likely to find where the girls outnumber the guys. It's been implied a few times that the organizer of the team, being a womanizer, did this deliberately.
- Lighter and Softer: Considerably more optimistic and humorous than typical 40k stories, though it still very much takes place in that universe. The writer has said that a theme of the story is finding the loving and humanistic parts of living, even in a Crapsack World.
- Mildly Military: Everyone in the Edges has their old regiment's uniforms, and the overall attitude in the group is a lot looser. Zune has claimed that they'd rather buy better food than a group uniform.
- Misfit Mobilization Moment: The original reason for the Edges existing.
- Multinational Team: Well, the Imperial equivalent, anyway.
- Only Six Faces: A common source of Self-Deprecation, though it's improving. In particular, it's often joked that Boone and Cultist are basically the same character but with different clothes.
- Ship Tease: There's a lot for Boone and Raege, with Will They or Won't They? being a major question.
- Remember the New Guy?: Has happened on occasion, with new characters (including Boddicker, Magpie, and Colton) being introduced with a fairly simple "they were part of the unit before and we just never really met them."
- Rouge Angles of Satin: The creator of the series is dyslexic, which means that typos show up with unfortunate frequency.
- Shout-Out: Extremely common, with the biggest targets being Transformers and Team Fortress 2.
Boone Quest provides examples of:
- Achievement System: There's a mock one in place that apparently triggers for plot-relevant or bizarre actions.
- Anachronism Stew: It may be the 41st Millennium, but it seems a lot of old pop culture has survived to there.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Parodied; a set of artworks released after the Quest was done detailed all the "alternate outfits" that the players unlocked over the run of the game.
- Cut and Paste Comic: An unusual one; every character has a "sprite sheet" drawn up, and their actions are created from those sprites, allowing the images to created fairly quickly. Closeup shots are generally original art.
- A Day in the Limelight: Boone was always pretty central, but this is the story to most focus on her, as well as providing a lot of other fairly minor characters with a chance to shine.
- Lord British Postulate: Inverted. Nel was specifically intended to die as a Sacrificial Lamb; instead, the playerbase ended up using various means provided to them to cure her.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Boone briefly gets stuck in one, but figures it out when the illusion turns out to be too nice (as well as having a number of errors).
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Some of the more Shout-Out-heavy puzzles really fell into this, requiring some heavy hints to deal with. One of the biggest was a random-looking set of words designed to be connected to each other; as it turned out, they were a mixture of the G1 Dinobots and various characters in Metal Gear Solid that shared their voice actors.
- Multiple Endings: Despite being a Quest and therefore non-replayable, it's suggested that there were multiple different epilogues planned, which would vary depending on a major conversation in the last portion of the game.
- Shout-Out: Probably the most Shout-Out-laden portion of the story. Understanding them was pretty much required for some puzzles.
- Story-Breaker Power: Cuddles and Nada, the two strongest members of the crew, spend most of the story away from the action or out of commission, and neither are ever usable companions, likely because if they were usable, their powers would amount to "I win." (In fairness, Nada is out for other reasons as well.)
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Sapp thinks that Boone won't shoot her. She is wrong◊.
