Lion? If you’re a human in 40k you’re more likely to be a mangy street cat forced to work in a factory processing other cats into fancy feast. Fuck yeah I’ll be the Taus little pet over that, I can work in at a space turnip farm or something, maybe they’ll give me little human treats.
I think fan wikis and YouTube have lowered the barrier for entry for getting into the lore so much that it’s really not as unusual as someone having, say, good Star Trek lore knowledge these days. I’ve met pretty normie ass people who nonetheless know who like Chaos Gods and Space Marines are, same way a normie person is probably familiar with like Captain Picard and the Enterprise.
Fan wikis have been a thing for a while now tho. Something really recent happened specifically with 40k. YouTube algorithm has shown me it’s big enough to have been part of a South Park episode. It just seems super sudden and fairly recent.
I’m deeply familiar with a lot of super nerdy shit, I am a massive star trek and Tolkien nerd and working my way there with Gundam. I dont know what Chaos God is and barely know what a Space Marine is. I even used to play a lot of tabletops and forever Warhammer was kinda its own separate thing with a small but really into fan base. It got really mainstream recently and I dont really get it. My main connection is via the band Bolt Thrower and if everyone is listening to World Eater now that is sick
Really it was “If The Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device” blowing up on YouTube, imo, which spent alot of time shitting on the state of the Fandom and Games Workshop at the time (specifically voicing the absurdity of worshipping the Space Marines (fucking blueberries)). It got a lot of normal people I knew into the lore, which then cascaded into the wider public knowledge.
Unfortunately, because of Games Workshop vaguely gesturing at sueing all fan made content, they no longer do those videos. The good part is that instead they are doing parody/extremely intense drama around Hunter:The Gathering (which is Vampire: The Masquerade from the perspective of humans that know that there is more to the world), which is amazing and so fucking good.
it’s the heap of video games. which is about as mainstream as a ‘franchise’ gets before a movie/tvshow. it helps that the games are allegedly pretty good recently.
While everyone’s bringing up good points about the videogames and YouTube videos, the biggest reason is that the public opinion on “nerd culture” finally fully flipped some time in the early 2010’s, after the Star Wars and LotR movies started moving the needle in the 00’s. All the nerd “final bosses” of the 80’s and 90’s were turning out to actually be quite good, or at least fun, so audiences were more willing to engage with things that had previously been socially off-limits, like Anime, D&D, and Warhammer. Between them being made more accessible for the new audiences and the stigma fading away all the old nerd hobbies are becoming mainstream.
Maybe the video games have helped?
As a Star Trek nerd I’ll say normies are way more familiar with Kirk than picard