One of the reasons I don't like the lore of W40K is the anticlerical tropes about the church as enemy of the science and the reason. It is not only annoying and offensive, but as dangerous as messages promoting homophobia or racism. Haven't you thought anytime maybe any horrible things said about the Spanish empire were only lies by enemy propaganda? The pirates movies tell English corsairs were brave to attack Spanish ships, but in the real world the Spanish ships went together in convoys to avoid those pirates. The most of attacks by pirates were against coast villages to catch slavers. Spain built universities in the new world for the naives, Spain published books about naive American languanges when any European countries hadn't yet done with theirs. We may need humildity and self-criticism to not become monsters, but don't allow be emotinally manipulated apealling the shame and the guilty shame, and less when others should
Let's imagine for a second all that look of neogothic art by the space marines was replaced by Russian and Chinese esthetic. Can you notice now the potential menace of the speculative fiction being used as a propagandistic weapon?
If some day GW is acquired by a bigger fish, you could bet a restart of the IP to be more.... open-mind and flexible.
So you have unwittingly found the one person sympathetic to your argument. My family is from Latin America, and when I proudly told my dad about all the bad things the Spanish did to the natives, he pointed out, "You ever wonder why there are lots of indigenous people in Latin America but none in British America?" (I'm also half Jewish, which means I get to joke about how
El Cantar de Mio Cid has a scene about half of my ancestors ripping each other off. I'm on both sides of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492! But--realistically, go back far enough and odds were some of your ancestors were doing bad things to another group of your ancestors.) I got to hear how the Spanish Armada was destroyed through English ingenuity and design in school, and a storm at home.
I am aware of the Black Legend, and will grant you that the narrative of the Spanish crown being infinitely worse than the British has...an air of British propaganda to it, not to mention history being written by the winners (
o estaríamos charlando en español). As for anti-Catholic prejudice, while the Church suppressed Galileo, they were also the ones keeping what was left of classical learning alive through the Middle Ages. So it's not totally fair. (And for example, the Catholic church doesn't have a problem with evolution, unlike certain Protestant sects in the USA.)
But, you know, think about it. Games Workshop is a
British company
. People like to favor their own group, and Spaniards aren't a group people on the left feel all that bad for, as a former colonial power. Now has there been Russian and Chinese imperialism? You bet! (Knew a gal from Vietnam who had all kinds of things to say about the second one...) But there isn't a large and loud Spanish-British or Spanish-American lobby (Hispanic Americans are from all over Latin America and have our own disagreements), and due to American cultural politics the Catholic church doesn't have much leverage over generally left-leaning game designers. (I can't speak to the British variety, though given the linguistic similarity I'd bet there's a lot of crossover.) Note that Russia
is often used as a villain in American Hollywood productions, since there's no concern about racism there.
tl;dr: you've got old-school Protestant-Catholic rivalry (the Brits spent a
lot of their history fighting Catholic powers like Spain and France) plus new-school concerns about racism to make the Catholic church (like Russia) one of the few remaining acceptable targets. (I actually kind of think the USA, with its large Irish/Polish/Italian/Latin American immigrant populations, wouldn't have leaned into that, though we mess up lots of other stuff.)
Best thing I can think to say is either (1) try for the Spanish RPG market, which I think is still undercapitalized or (2) make Spanish-centered medieval European supplements, most of the stuff is still Britain/France/Germany.
