Warhammer Noob Reacts to If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device Episode 15

The whole Tau thing is a riff on how some 40k fans really don't like them, taken to its logical extreme. Without their alien auxiliaries they melee capabilities are limited to stepping on things with big stompy robots, and they're not particularly good at that either. The robot thing is also a bit of a point of contention because the Tau's approach to war is seen as very pragmatic, where when they learned about Imperial Titans (and got stomped by them) that the best way to fight them was not to build giant robots of their own, but instead take spaceship grade guns, strap them to large aircraft and pick the Titans off that way. Which worked very well and was quite economical... but not for GW. So instead of going the route of "big gun on simple gun platform" route the Tau made the Riptide battlesuit, which was massive cheese when it came out. And then they made the even bigger Stormsurge, which has the MASSIVE design flaw of an open air cockpit, so anything from shrapnel, flamethrowers fired from above or even heavy rain will render the thing inoperable. And then Forge World made the even bigger Ta'Unar Supremacy Armor, which IRL costs to the tune of its primary weapon costing as much as a single Riptide. And yes, there is Commander Farsight. He turned against the Tau command when the Ethereal mind control on him wore off after not being exposed to it for long enough during a campaign, so he and his forces splintered off and formed the Farsight Enclaves. Because of his demeanour, red armor and silver helmet he is what Gundam fans would call a "Char Aznable expy". Farsight also has his own nakama of battlesuit pilots that have all the archetypes you'd expect from such a character: the quiet strategist, the old soldier, a robot buddy, the non-soldier guy who proved himself and gets to fight, the dude who had his life saved and is now in debt to the main character, and the girl who wants protag-kun to notice her and does so through overwhelming violence, in her case with flamethrowers. This last one especially, sub-commander Torchstar, gets a LOT of fanart despite A: we don't know what she actually looks like and B: we do know that the curves she's drawn with are much larger than what is canon for a Tau, who are slim, have little body fat and are as flat as a board. They also have hooves instead of feet. Oh, and officially they are named T'au. This is because Games Workshop has recently gone on a copyright spree so now you have the Aeldari, Drukhari, Astra Militarum, Adepta Sororitas and most of Age of Sigmar instead of Eldar, Dark Eldar, Imperial Guard, Sisters of Battle and so on. This is because Games Workshop is really keen on owning the rights to the names of their stuff, and they changed to T'au because not even they have the financial clout to copyright one of the letters of the Greek alphabet. This unfortunately also means that they are quite litigious, like the woman who wrote a book called "Spots the Space Marine" can attest. There's even rumors that they tried to copyright the word "pauldron" at one time. There are limits though: they renamed Malekith to Malerion because Malekith is one of the villains in the Thor comic books and not even Games Workshop is greedy enough to anger the Mouse.

Beriorn