YMMV / Astartes

• Broken Base: On March 10, 2021, the series was officially bought up by Games Workshop. The fanbase was instantly fractured into two camps as could be seen in the announcement video.
  • One half was naturally psyched for the creator being made an official employee of GW, meaning future episodes are assured and he's now getting paid for his work.
  • The other half were incensed that the buyout meant all episodes were taken off of YouTube and are now only viewable on the GW site, that their Patreon donations would seemingly not be refunded and fear of GW interference with future episodes.
• Fridge Brilliance: The entirety of the series is mostly without dialogue... that we can decipher, at least. When the Inquisitor psyker is outmatched by the captive Orb, one can hear him very clearly speaking and doing so very loudly from beneath the helmet, but it's too muffled to decipher. It's entirely likely that everyone has always been talking, but we can't actually hear any of it because they're using transmitters in their helmets. And to do so, they don't speak loud enough to be heard past the helmet's reinforced exterior.
• Memetic Mutation: From Part 5, the scene in which the Inquisitorial psyker gets possessed and immediately killed by the Retributor's commander and beakie has quickly become a meme.
• Spiritual Successor: The Retributors can be considered this to the "Reasonable Marines: A fan-made chapter of space marines that abandoned the idea of livery and Awesome, but Impractical tactics and settled for minimalism and ruthless efficiency. In particular, the Reasonable Marines are mostly parodic in nature, so the Retributors can be considered a more lore-friendly version of said chapter, leaning more into the tactical efficiency angle than /tg/'s own take on more serious Reasonable Marines, the Knights Inductor. And on March 10, 2021, the Retributors officially became canon.
• Moment of Awesome: The series runs on minimalism and Competence Porn, so episodes are peppered with short but poignant and impactful moments of awesome, ranging from clever tactics and actions by all participants to believably conveying the superhuman extent of Astartes abilities through their actions alone.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The GW buyout version of the series adds extra music, changes sound effects and edits scenes down to fit in a single 12 minute video. Some of the music also had to be changed due to copyright reasons. Some people were naturally not pleased.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The characters and equipment not only have tremendous amounts of detail, but are also all accurate to the source material. Then there are the effects, like smoke, the distorted echo of bolt rounds in a corridor, lighting arcs, plasma bursts, and all the gore that is involved in an Astartes assault are extremely lifelike. Most impressively is in its rich subtlety such as the concussion of a nearby bolt round causing the Veteran Sergeant's cape to flap. And then you are informed that all this was done by one guy.