France-based Warhammer 40k fan Paul Marceaux lost his father Frédéric to suicide nine years ago, with their final tabletop match only half completed. Now, after nearly a decade, he’s finally unpacked the 40k army his father left behind – and tells Wargamer his story.
Warhammer 40,000 was the strongest link Marceaux had with his father. The pair had started the hobby together back in 2011, beginning with the Assault on Black Reach box, and Paul fondly remembers shared painting sessions and 10-hour long battles in the summer, when less nerdy members of the family were out on the beach. Before long, Paul had abandoned the Orks for the more sinister Necrons, while Frédéric stuck firmly and proudly with the blue brothers of Ultramar.
Four years later, Paul stopped his Warhammer hobby abruptly when his father took his own life. The father and son had been playing a raucous game with fits of laughter the night Frédéric killed himself, and Paul, a teenager at the age of 16, had gone to bed with every expectation that they would finish up the next day. He recalls family members arriving on the confusing morning after the police had been, and having to clear away the game laid out on the living room table.
Marceaux says strong family bonds with his sister and mother helped him through the grieving process, but it would be two years before he went back to Warhammer.
“It was so painful to look at miniatures when he was gone,” he tells Wargamer.
Instead, Paul found other ways to get to know his father: “Watching movies or shows he liked helped me understand who he was,” he says, giving examples of Lost and the DnD videogame Neverwinter Nights 2.
A decade later, Marceaux, now a committed hobbyist once more, finally decided to unpack his dad’s Ultramarines collection.
“I’ve lived in a different city for a few years now, so my Necrons and his Marines waited in the cellar of my mom’s house, while my new armies (Tyranids, Genestealer Cults and Chaos Space Marines) are in my personal house,” he says.
Until this year, Marceaux had never shown much interest in unboxing the Space Marine army. Partly, that’s because he’s “not so much of an Imperium enjoyer”, but partly it was the connection to his father that made him hesitant.
“I think I was seeing them as ‘not my stuff’ and I didn’t have the right to use them,” he says. “That’s something I’ve experienced before with his other stuff : I feel like it is not mine, while actually… It is now. I’ve inherited it, so now it’s mine. It’s hard to understand.”
A chance encounter a few months ago with a half-painted Ultramarine, mysteriously lost in a box full of Hormagaunts, was what inspired Marceaux to go back to his father’s collection. After painting the soldier in eye popping magenta and green, creating the custom legion Adeptus Castores (Space Beavers), he decided “to see my dad’s Marines again. To see how he painted them and understand what he loved about Ultramarines.”
“It was a very emotional experience,” Marceaux reveals. “I didn’t know what I expected but this really shook me a lot. To see something he spent so much time and love on, I really think it got us closer again.”
As a child, Marceaux says he had been rather intently focused on his own models, and hadn’t spent too much time looking at his father’s, so it was a revelation to rediscover the marines and see the choices his dad had made when building and painting his favorite Warhammer 40k faction.
“One of my favorite sides of his army is the shoulder trims being of different colors, meaning marines come from different companies. That’s such a niche and nerdy thing to do; I honestly love my dad for doing that!”
“My favorite of his models were his Dreadnoughts, and I remember these were his favorite too. He had three, who he called ‘Les frères Pim, Pam et Poum’ which you could translate to something like: the Brothers Boom, Bang and Crash!”
“Brother Crash is a Venerable Dread which he actually kitbashed for the weapons: the twin autocannons are taken from the Aegis Defense Line. Today, I can say I’m a kitbasher and I love conversions, so I’m kinda proud of him for having kitbashed some minis too. This is part of some very specific things that link us.”
Marceaux recently remembered that his dad had a blog where he talked about 40k and WW1 “What a nerd!” he says. “On it there are two battle reports, I loved reading them and living the battles one more time”
The memory of their final game is vivid in Paul’s mind, to the point that he remembers the specific jokes he and his father told during the battle. Its lack of conclusion still gives him the sense that something was left unfinished, though he jokes that he would’ve definitely lost by a mile. “I played really badly,” he relates.
As for what will happen to the Space Marine collection, Paul plans to turn it into a touching tribute.
“For the Ultramarines, I’m thinking of a future big diorama with all of them in it, gathering in a parade way to honour a fallen Chapter Master, which would represent my dad. Maybe I’ll paint him in a marble statue effect, that would be cool.”
“For the unpainted models, they are going to become Space Beavers, and in the lore I’ll add that most of the SB have fought alongside my dad’s Ultramarines. The Dreadnought will be named Siegfried, which is not too far off Frédéric.”
Source: Wargamer
