Game of Thrones is the most obvious comparison imho, so think of that but throw in spaceships, demons, people duelling with chainsaws, BDSM aliens, and the beach landing of Saving Private Ryan happening so often that individual wars, never mind battles, can be forgotten by the in universe history.

The world of Warhammer 40k is scifi with a lot of gothic influence and religious mania, factional grudges and subcultures. There's a big emphasis on the control of information, propaganda, and the the idea the golden ages are all over and all that's left for everyone is entropy.

The main "storyline" is that about 10k years ago, the human imperium was split apart by a civil war. The traitors/heretics have allied with demons, and the surviving Imperium has turned itself into a fanatical cult of bureaucratic lunacy that fetishizes the lost heyday to the point of regression. The war wiped out all the heroes who might have prevented the ongoing collapse of everything that is now just a forgone conclusion.

You can think of the result as a mixture of Judge Dredd, Game of Thrones, Event Horizon and Battlestar Galactica. There are warp drives sure, but there are also flamethrower wielding nuns. There are interstellar empires, but AI is considered so dangerous that most machinery must have an organic component - ie a lobotomised human - integrated into it and be religiously blessed. The Imperium is technically still standing, but all its fundamental structures and tech is failing.

The Traitors may have failed to win and collapsed into infighting, but they're still out there and their gods are alive and taking calls, so their day's going to come eventually.

Both Imperial and Traitor factions have subgroups within, also, with distinct cultures of their own. So there are Mongolian biker horde or Soviet conscript flavored Imperials vs traitor plague zombie knights or Egyptian sorcerer Traitors.

On top of that you've got Orks (football hooligan orcs who fight for the love of it), Eldar (shifty space elf supremacists who consider humans disposable apes), Necrons (Egyptian flavored space Terminators who want to wipe out all life), Tyranids (space bugs who devour worlds at a time) and Tau (anime flavored nice guy fish men who are largely irrelevant, but are developing tech humans no longer can). All factions are at war, but sometimes enter into allegiances of convenience which can be a ton of fun.

It is very dark in the sense that every happy ending usually comes with a reveal of how shitty the cost of the win actually was, but there's also a lot of black humor in it, particularly in stories of how average day to day humans are getting by in the middle of all this operatic craziness.

Up until quite recently, Games Workshop was quite careful who they allowed the license to. This went for games, media and third party merch (bobble heads etc)

This started changing, I would say, sometime after the huge success of the first Dawn of War game. There are now a whole rash of spin off games, action figures, even plushies.

A tv series based around the Eisenhorn stories was even in development at one point, but there has been radio silence on it, so that can be assumed as dead.

In the meantime, they've started their own subscription app that has animations, which is about as close as we'll get for a while I suspect.

As much as I'd love to see a big GoT scale adaptation, I think there are two big issues with that prospect rn -

1. Firstly, translating 40k recognisably would require an enormous budget. Just to have Space Marine characters walking around next to a random Guardsman would mean $$$$ in terms of layers of bespoke costuming, custom props, a ton of set dressing and CGI polish.

2. The game itself is struggling right now to figure out how to welcome new players to this grimdark world without making itself palatable to Nazis.

They went way too far on using the Ultramarines as a newbie friendly "vanilla" faction in a bunch of starter kits, stories and subgames, and that's made it much too easy for people to mistake the Imperium for default goodguys. The hopscotch from there to unironic use of the Imperium's fascist imagery or intentionally OTT battle slogans is much too easy to make as a result, currently.

To GW's credit, they seem to recognise the problem now and have started rowing back on it a little, but those issues would be amplified a million times by the simplification required to flatten this universe down to something tv shaped.

A lot of folks unimpressed by Lot 36 - I actually liked it a lot but it felt like one of those Youtube recaps of a longer, meatier story? Like, the bones of a cracking premise are there, but there's so little breathing space and the final pursuit is so brief and abrupt it feels like a waste of a terrific set up not to draw it out a few more moments.

There are other theoretical types of paradox in conversations about time travel, though most are about how "real" time travel would affect the world.

For example, the Fermi Paradox - "where is everyone?". The idea is that, if time travel will ever be possible, travellers should already have started coming back way in the past already and any character or person learning about it for the first time should probably take it for granted.

Another, arguably a Grandfather Paradox variation, is the Hitler Paradox. Say for example I headed back in time to prevent something happening, did it successfully, and headed home. This is a paradox, because now there's no way I could have known about the event I just prevented in order to prevent it. There was no reason for the time travel to happen at all and the future I go back to shouldn't be the same as the one that sent me. So how did they send me, and will there be another me when I get back?

The Grandfather Paradox is specifically about the traveller's own existence. They have prevented themselves existing to prevent their own existence.

Skynet's situation is sort of another Bootstrap Loop, it seeds itself in the past just as John ensures his own conception, by steering Kyle towards it.

Grandfather Paradox is the opposite to a Bootstrap Loop, and it predates Futurama - the premise is that you have travelled back to kill your grandfather, not be him, thereby preventing yourself being born, which means you couldn't have gone back to kill him.

T2's Grandfather Paradox is that by preventing the war, they're preventing Kyle being born (and incidentally, John) and the time travel tech he used existing, which should mean it's impossible to prevent the war.

Futurama inverted it as a meta joke.

Terminator's the big one. First one's a bootstrap loop, ie fate asserts itself and future events guarantee past ones.

T2 is a Grandfather Paradox - the loop is broken by conditions supplied by the loop itself, creating a paradox in which relics of a future that won't happen have an effect.

Dark Fate is a kind of hybrid. It's the half way point of a bootstrap loop, but the characters intend to force a paradox, I think "fuck fate!" actually comes up in dialogue

It's miserable what AV Club has turned into tbh. It's just another clickbait mill.

Station Eleven - >!Kirsten steps up to become leader of the troupe in the last ep.!<

The purpose of this tier is to bring in new viewers, sure, but maybe more importantly to make the next ad free price rise feel reasonable.

That's what I was thinking. KLF style performance art.

Idk. I feel weird about it, but it’s kind of an interesting question to wrestle with. Which is the point, of course.

Ugh.