Gav Thorpe

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

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Gav Thorpe is a dude in GW's development department. He is the one largely responsible for the grand mother bull moose of all mixed blessings that was the 4th edition Codex: Chaos Space Marines as well as the transition from the golden age of Warhammer Fantasy into the literal End Times. The former was a huge subject of RAGE and winDread, compartmentalized in one work that has drawn both many supporters - and many completely justified haters. The latter was just shit.

He has since moved into writing for Black Library, working on almost everything that has anything to do with the Eldar (most notably the Path of the Eldar trilogy).

Why the Controversy?

To put it inoffensively and politely; although generally his writing hasn't been too bad, it's nowhere near as good as far more prominent writers. He's the guy behind the gloriously bad and cheesy ending to Storm of Chaos. He was quite terrible at the time, and he's always shown a very erratic understanding of even the most "historical" characters of Fantasy and 40k, as well as a sense of mystery, which others like Matt Ward also seem lo lack.

While most of his writing has left a bad taste in the mouth of the community, his work on the 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy army books is generally praised. In particular Hordes Of Chaos (when all of Chaos, minus the Skaven, was one faction) and Dwarfs are beloved to fans of those armies. BUT...he was the Loremaster for Fantasy at the time, and he was far from light-handed so even at the best in his career he still had major faults.

Gav also wrote the script for the Warhammer Fantasy game Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.

Gav also tops the list of writing for 10 year olds in the field of Dark Angels fiction. Consistently pumping out green Power Armored garbage in perhaps the worst BL series since James Swallow tried to crown himself King of shit writing with his Blood Angels series.

Among the best examples of his poor display of writing style is his infamous views on elves. "there are as many elves as the plot demands." In one story they can write off the death of a million as a grand victory, but in the next the death of a hundred is a tragedy from which their race will never recover. Either way they will always be a dying race (with no word on how the High Elves or Dark Elves replenish their numbers for these huge wars with each other). Gav's works are not a place of logic or consistency. This is to say nothing of his requirement that Elves retain the traits of the Eldar (souls eaten by Slaanesh, never worship Chaos) and the constant need to retcon anything that doesn't fit his very 40k-centric view of Warhammer lore.

Thorpe's trademark is his whiny faggot sentimentality when writing about pussy-ass Elves by referring to a tired formula menat to instill a sense of grand loss in the reader which only works the first two or three times before it gets irritating, and worse still he applies the same methodology to the Dark Angels and Raven Guard. Thorpe was basically that morose emo kid who cuts himself and never grew out of it.

Worth noting that the very characterful and developed army lists of the previous Codex: CSM were replaced with much-more-generic-flavor army lists. Whilst the codex can undeniably support many forces much better now and is considerably more-balanced from a crunch standpoint un-fucking-usable than some of what the previous Codex brought to the table in terms of bullshit (+5 points for +1 I awesome possum noise marines!), It also completely raped anything regarding ability regarding the variant legions, threw its unconscious body out a window and removed all options for viable weapons. If you were running a Night Lords stealth army, Iron Warriors warband with additional heavy support, Alpha Legion cult strike force, you would find that the new rules simply don't give much to let you keep playing the way you originally did. Hell if you played a normal chaos army your troops are all now fucking useless. Raptors and Obliterators are no longer hard-capped, but special rules for Word Bearer champions, Iron Warriors Warsmiths, and Alpha Legion cultists are all completely absent. Faction-specific armies didn't suffer anywhere near as much - except in one critical role: Daemons. Chaos lost all faction-and-Chaos-specific Daemons, and any army that relied on them (especially the Word Bearers, which could field more than any other force), either for fluff reasons or crunch reasons (and pretty much all the Daemons were viable at one point or another in 3rd) was completely and utterly screwed. CSM didn't even get to keep the Chaos Undivided Furies, for fuck's sake. Chaos also lost Greater Daemons of all stripes, and all we got in exchange were GENERIC DAEMON PACK and GENERIC GREATER DAEMON, which whilst they can be useful (many players made GOOD use of them during official tournaments), are nothing but a pale shadow of what used to be available to Chaos Space Marines.

Why did Chaos lose them? Because Gav Thorpe decided that the Daemons needed their own Codex and update. By and large, players refer to most of the new Daemon models that followed this Codex to be fail; the new "one boob only" Daemonettes are absolutely fail-tastic compared to the lithe and graceful-looking ones of the previous edition. Oh, think that's bad? It happened in Fantasy too, breaking up Hordes of Chaos into Beastmen, Daemons, and Warriors of Chaos. Only the last was truly competitive, the first being fucked to pieces on release.

The crunch is also a mixed bag. There's a lot of Craptastic things in the new codex too - Updated Sucktastic Chaos Lords, much Diminished setups using the Chaos Mark system, and more. Sadly, this is quite the anal rape for what we lost (their complaining is quite valid). So whilst this may be a mulligan on Thorpe's part (He's really a bad codex writer and did fuck up most codices to this scale before the eyes of many and the since; his involvement in 'Nids was light and Robin Cruddance took that opportunity to nerf the shit out of them, but that really wasn't Thorpe's fault), Chaos Players forevermore will continue to loathe his very existence and long to drag his soul screaming to the Warp when his time is finally up.

Most fa/tg/uys tacitly agree that he should probably stick to writing for Black Library and stay the hell away from pointy-ear lore and crunch.

Matt Ward later wrote the Iyanden mini-dex which has them win their battles, something Gav cannot do. However the Supplement also writes Iyanden as being incompetent assholes who didn't even listen to ELDRAD when he stopped by to warn them of their Tyranid-chow future, in a rare example of him not being a dick. It's fair to call it even.

Where he stands as of 5th Edition Grey Knights Codex

Much of /tg/ has decided that Matthew Ward is infinitely worse than this guy can ever hope to be. He hasn't mutilated the canon, he didn't FANBOY OVERPOWER anything except Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy, and he's been around long enough not to do anything too horrendously stupid instead he made an entire army invalid. Plus, the man can write at over a special Pre School for rocks level, unlike a certain other writer. There are some that belive him to be worse than ward as his codices or more than not, at least somewhat playable, whereas Thorpe's books strip the associated army of its flavour.

As a BL writer, his obsession with the space elves seems to be connected with a near-total lack of understanding of how they work, with his Path of the Eldar novels' plots requiring practically everyone on Alaitoc to be a drooling imbecile to work and going on bizarre tangents about how Khaine is supposedly related to Khorne. You'd think someone so insistent on writing a given faction would at least have their facts straight about them and not make them all look like emotionally stunted retards.

He's also one half of the Kyme-Thorpe law which states 'all Dark angel and salamander books must be shit.'

End Times, Age Of Sigmar

Wait, you thought Matt Ward was the villain of Games Workshop that lays at the feet of Tom Kirby and laughs? The literal death of Warhammer Fantasy, of which Gav was a major player, showed just who the real bottom of the barrel writer at the company is.