Space Din-O-Pinions | There's an Old Black Coach a'Comin

Jokes aside about a catchy song from a kids cartoon, I could belabor the point about how I painted this model or how awesome it is, but a quick Google search will give you plenty of models to peruse and people talking about how they painted it. Instead, I'm going to talk about the theme of this model in relation to its faction.  

Oh here he goes, about to wax poetic. Yes, I am, but I figured it actually results in an opinion and something to read about other than my vapid statements of "I used this green paint". That has its place, don't get me wrong, but I want to do something different.

So what do I mean about theme? Google's second definiton describes it as "an idea that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature". Debates aside about whether miniature painting truly counts as art, this concept is what I'm looking at with this model. 

Before we can dive into the model itself, let's look at the faction it belongs to: the Nighthaunt. In Age of Sigmar, the Nighthaunt are an army of ghosts raised by Nagash, the god of Death. There's usually a cruel poetic justice to this resurrection: healers in life find themselves eternally forced to murder in death, hunters find themselves fused to their mounts and forced to constantly track down the enemies of Nagash. That kind of stuff. And these ideas find themselves displayed all over the models, from those healers having their hands they once used to help others replaced with blades and those hunters having horse skulls and glaives always pointed forward their prey. It's a neat concept and it's executed very well; for the most part. 

For you see, while I love the Black Coach very, very much, it's a bit at odds with the overall theme. The lore behind the Black Coach is that a vampire or necromancer's physical remains are entombed in the carriage, and are ferried from battle to battle to absorb the death magic that results from people dying in combat. It's a very tasty bit of lore, but nowhere else in the army is their a mortal being like that. There's no vampires or necromancers that are guiding the ghosts. Other, more powerful ghosts lead the army. So why does this centerpiece of the army focus on something that's not present in the rest of the faction? 

The reason is something that Age of Sigmar can struggle with sometimes. This model is a refresh of a model from Warhammer Fantasy, where the ghosts were all wrapped together into a faction with the skeletons, the zombies, the bats, and the vampires. The faction was the Vampire Counts, and in this context, the lore worked. But in Age of Sigmar, all that got separated into their own factions. So the lore and the theme of the Black Coach are holdovers from old lore. I get the feeling that Games Workshop wanted to make the sculpt, and had to decide between Nighthaunt or Legions of Nagash/Soulblight Gravelords, and they went for Nighthaunt as large chunks of the model are taken up by spectral beings. 

That's ok, but it just results in this weird discrepancy. However, as Age of Sigmar ages, it moves further and further away from Warhammer Fantasy, and I think that's a good thing for both games. It makes them more distinct, and I have room in my heart to love both systems. So things like this will become fewer and fewer, unless GW decides that miniatures need to be cross-compatible between the two games, in which case the opposite will happen and the problem will get much worse. 

Hopefully that doesn't happen.

-The Space Dinosaur

PS. Oh, and this gets another block on the hobby bingo for me. I count it as a vehicle. I can now either go diagonally down from top left to bottom right, or straight down from top left.