I'm not going to sugar-coat it, I really dislike this model as a Militarum/Guard piece and it makes me quietly terrified for what GW might do to the Guard if this is the direction of travel.

I don't have a problem with the idea of a Guard commander on a horse - I think there's a lot of interesting things you could do with the concept of rough riders, the Kreig horsemen or even a 40k Field Marshal Haig model which exemplifies the dichotomy of the hyper advanced and the 'still using horseflesh to power your armies'.

I also don't have a problem with a character who's obviously meant to be a joke or a parody, and you can certainly have a lot of fun mining the traditional 'rich but useless' view of the officer class approach, and a character that was designed in the spirit of the Red Gobbo or some of the more extreme Necromundan ideas could possibly work if you really went for it - the Guard commander with a full entourage of someliers, valets etc would be a good fun model to play around with.

This is just... eugh. At first, second and third glance I genuinely thought this was a Stormcast or a reborn member of the Fantasy Empire for Cities of Sigmar, and if you wanted a more toned down version of something like Karl Franz or Balthasar Gelt, I think it would be a perfectly good model for that. Equally, if you were launching the Imperial Army in 30k, I can again see that it fits in with that slightly antiquated, ornate ceremonial look which fits it perfectly.

But for Militarum? It looks too clean, too prissy, too fantastical to take seriously or fit in with pretty much any of the existing range as is. There's bits of the Militarum in there but they're obscured by the shiny and the ornamental which completely distract from anything else, and you have to stare at it for far too long to start picking up the cues which hint it might be Militarum (mainly the helmet, the collar, the shoulder pads and arguably the gloves).

Even ignoring the fact that almost any other character in the faction would be deserving of a new centrepiece model (Yarrick, Pask, Cain to name but three) over a new character, the only way I can see this as fitting in is if it were deliberately meant as a clueless idiot from Terra who liked playing dress-up and who'd only got his commission through politicing and was completely oblivious to the reality of war.

It would be a fairly poor joke, but if you put in a ruleset which was a bit more sarcastic (so basically saying he was stupidly lucky or his men fought hard in the hope he'd get promoted out of their hair), you might get him being used as an in joke and a nice palate cleanser compared to the others. But instead, the fluff seems to imply he's the greatest general since Creed (if not moreso) and is seen as a straight up unironic hero - he's literally the cover star of the codex and on the box art for the army set.

On the whole, I'd like to think I'm a fairly level headed fan - I get why GW want to include more people in the hobby, and that the Guard especially post challenges around model variation and army design which others perhaps don't, so I can see why other factions have had priority over the Guard. But this... I'm not going to go as far as saying that this is a deliberate *up yours* to some of the community who want the Guard to go in a different direction, but I'm really struggling to work out who genuinely thought this was going to go down well at the moment.