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Sympathy for the heretic

Tithed_Verse said:
Still, there is Anti-Christ implications around the emps. Here. See.
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Uh.... Isn't it actually implied that the GEoM is actually Jesus in the backstory though? And maybe Muhammad? And Saint George? And Joan of Arc?

Sure, the implications are there, but I seem to recall him actively founding Christianity in one of his early experiments.

Ugolino said:
We will die free.

There are those among us who will resist. They will call us heretic, apostate, traitor, blasphemer. All the tired old meaningless labels, parroted from lines fed to our fathers before us, and their fathers before them. They will cling blindly to the decrees of the bloated old monster hidden away behind his palace walls, side with the thugs calling themselves our planet's "defenders". There will be those who cower or rush to aid our oppressors at the threat of retribution. Those who fear answering for their own sins, or who simply blind themselves to the truth.

Justice balances in all accounts. We don't need fables to know that. If there ever was an Emperor, if he was anything remotely human, He must have long since turned his face away in shame from what His Imperium has done to its children.

No god worth the name would support this. Our children taken to die for meaningless wars. The slow death in the factories, or the quick death at the hands of the governor's death squads. The Cardinals feasting while the workers starve. The Black Ships and sinister figures in the night. The flesh-culls, and screams you can hear from the highest hive towers. It's no wonder the nobles never leave their spires.

Should it take all of our lives, we shall die free.

We all know we risk far worse than simple death. Should we be found, we all know the price. The Church takes time, in between bleating about the joys of servitude, to spell out in loving detail the fate of the blasphemer, the seditionist, the heretic. The Arbitrators have their show trials shown on every pic-caster. There are gibbets of cold iron above every street corner. Even should we fail, even should they clasp us in chains, we will die free. They may break us, but even in the breaking, we will not be meek chattel. By the manner of our deaths shall they know that we are free.

We will clog their tracks with our dead. We will stand and drown out their insanity with a million voices raised as one. Perhaps victory is beyond us. Perhaps we're fighting a hopeless war, bringing down merciless retribution for imagined sins, or offering ourselves to some distant horror from the stars. But our follies will be our own, not those of some distant, uncaring master or false godhead. We will die without masters, and with our own purpose. We will die free.
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And this. This is exactly what I think is A Good Thing. At least for the narrative.
 
Old Spice Guy said:
Plot twist, The Emperor is what happens when Morty's get too assertive.
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"Rick, you have to get us the fuck out of here! These people are backwards savages! They sacrifice their own people because they think it makes the space beacon I made work! Everyone's gross and they all worship me even though I explicitly told them not to do that!"
 
Guy of G said:
People dont ilke it when you shift the setting into something unrecognizable go figure
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How does the setting become unrecognizable simply because the Imperium is not treated as worthy of being considered the heroes by default?

Frankly if anything Chaos being a dangerous force that nevertheless can be harnessed to somewhat productive ends and the Imperium being full of unnecessary cruelty make the setting more, not less, recognizable because now you actually give people an incentive to turn to Chaos, the Radical Inquisitors make sense, and the Imperium's unnecessary cruelty, which is already text, is emphasized.
 
Ugolino said:
We will die free.

There are those among us who will resist. They will call us heretic, apostate, traitor, blasphemer. All the tired old meaningless labels, parroted from lines fed to our fathers before us, and their fathers before them. They will cling blindly to the decrees of the bloated old monster hidden away behind his palace walls, side with the thugs calling themselves our planet's "defenders". There will be those who cower or rush to aid our oppressors at the threat of retribution. Those who fear answering for their own sins, or who simply blind themselves to the truth.

Justice balances in all accounts. We don't need fables to know that. If there ever was an Emperor, if he was anything remotely human, He must have long since turned his face away in shame from what His Imperium has done to its children.

No god worth the name would support this. Our children taken to die for meaningless wars. The slow death in the factories, or the quick death at the hands of the governor's death squads. The Cardinals feasting while the workers starve. The Black Ships and sinister figures in the night. The flesh-culls, and screams you can hear from the highest hive towers. It's no wonder the nobles never leave their spires.

Should it take all of our lives, we shall die free.

We all know we risk far worse than simple death. Should we be found, we all know the price. The Church takes time, in between bleating about the joys of servitude, to spell out in loving detail the fate of the blasphemer, the seditionist, the heretic. The Arbitrators have their show trials shown on every pic-caster. There are gibbets of cold iron above every street corner. Even should we fail, even should they clasp us in chains, we will die free. They may break us, but even in the breaking, we will not be meek chattel. By the manner of our deaths shall they know that we are free.

We will clog their tracks with our dead. We will stand and drown out their insanity with a million voices raised as one. Perhaps victory is beyond us. Perhaps we're fighting a hopeless war, bringing down merciless retribution for imagined sins, or offering ourselves to some distant horror from the stars. But our follies will be our own, not those of some distant, uncaring master or false godhead. We will die without masters, and with our own purpose. We will die free.
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And plot twist, they turn out to be a chaos cult.
 
veteranMortal said:
I believe that's part of the point of the thread. Yes, they're a Chaos cult. Because Chaos isn't as ridiculously, wretchedly evil as it is in canon, and is actually a viable alternative to the Imperium.
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So, how do we turn people like Slaneeshi Space Marines into less rapy happy lunatics?
 
Sabertooth said:
So, how do we turn people like Slaneeshi Space Marines into less rapy happy lunatics?
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Make them just generalized hedonists, with SOME of them being that bad? Mix in a few alternate evil options like "artists" who make people into art, perfectionists who kill people for their flaws, etc... so, still dark grey but not vantablack.
 
veteranMortal said:
Mostly because "they're all disgusting vile deviant rapists" sounds an awful lot like propaganda. And the Imperium being an explicitly fascist state doesn't help matters on that front.
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So that giant dude with horns on his brightly colored power armor with screaming (sometimes still living) faces on his power armor, dongs in places where it should not even be remotely possible is just misunderstood?
 
Sabertooth said:
So that giant dude with horns on his brightly colored power armor with screaming (sometimes still living) faces on his power armor, dongs in places where it should not even be remotely possible is just misunderstood?
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Of course not. Just don't make that the standard for how the Forces of Chaos, or 'Forces of Chaos' as the case may be, actually behave.
 
Sabertooth said:
So that giant dude with horns on his brightly colored power armor with screaming (sometimes still living) faces on his power armor, dongs in places where it should not even be remotely possible is just misunderstood?
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How many people do you think actually see slaaneshi space marines up close without either dying, or being one of the ones spreading the propaganda?

And what's the Imperium's normal response to people who survive close encounters with Chaos?
 
Sabertooth said:
So that giant dude with horns on his brightly colored power armor with screaming (sometimes still living) faces on his power armor, dongs in places where it should not even be remotely possible is just misunderstood?
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Well no, you're understanding him pretty clearly.

But then, the God-Emperor of Man won't make the Inquisition withdraw inquisitorial authority from a man who wears a cloak made from the scalps of eldar toddlers or something.

The idea that originally motivated the creation of this thread was something like:

"Hey, AS A CREATIVE PROJECT, imagine a slightly altered version of the 40k setting, in which Chaos isn't a one-way treadmill to evil and the laughter of thirsting gods. Suppose, rather, that Chaos is about, well, chaos. About transformation and alteration and fluidity and different ways of being, as opposed to the very firmly, belligerently ordered, organized, brutally disciplined, perenially square Imperium. Suppose that there are ways of being an adherent of Chaos that do not in fact involve sacrificing people to the blood gods. Notably, this doesn't mean that there wouldn't be crazed berserk cultists sacrificing people to blood gods, there still totally could be, it's just that they're not the entire thing that exists."

And some other ideas bubbled up around this.

"Hey, maybe the Warp varies from just being really weird, to being outright horrible, and what makes the difference is in large part the way your civilization and the civilizations immediately before you approached it, with things like debauchery and mass destruction causing the rise of warp horrors, while a period of relative peace and sanity calms the Warp and makes it easier to find Warp entities that aren't actually out to devour your soul in the name of one of the big four evil gods."

And:

"Hey, what if the horror of the setting comes, not from the frankly fascist and loathesome Imperium being the last slowly crumbling line of defense for the survival of humanity, but from the Imperium thinking it is the last line of defense, being so firmly convinced that its way is the only way that it's dragging most of humanity down with it. What if there would have been, or even still is, a way that humans could work together with Xenos, engage with the Warp in a way other than "try very hard to keep it off me so I don't get eaten," and stop wasting so much time on internecine warfare?"
 
Sabertooth said:
And plot twist, they turn out to be a chaos cult.
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As the writer would put it, their mistakes would be of their own volition.

It's not an omniscient viewpoint- outrage and a vague awareness that everything about their world/setting is horribly wrong/unjust as filtered through the limitations of an intellectually crippled Imperial upbringing. The writer is rejecting the premise of Imperial necessity, is well aware how their revolution's likely to end...and is making a choice to rise up anyway, because that's what happens when someone raised from birth in a society like the Imperium and with a correspondingly crippled worldview decides to do something- the mentality of "for every one of us who falls ten more will take his place" applied to revolution.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
Make them just generalized hedonists, with SOME of them being that bad? Mix in a few alternate evil options like "artists" who make people into art, perfectionists who kill people for their flaws, etc... so, still dark grey but not vantablack.
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Alternatively, focus on the fact that Slaneesh is the chaos god of pride and skill, with their doctrine less focusing on the rape and murder and focusing more on excellence in as many fields as they choose to pursue.
 
Aranfan said:
Hilariously, democratic structures are less vulnurable to the subversive aspects of chaos than authoritarian structures. Because Chaos only needs to subvert the dude at the top in the authoritarian structure to corrupt the whole place, in a democracy chaos needs to corrupt a sizable percentage of the population.
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As I understand it, the Horus Heresy is essentially in-universe proof of this.

First, the Emperor set himself up as the sole viable leader of the Imperium. And then he did himself one better by making Horus the leader of his entire war machine. Once Horus flipped to Chaos, there was no way to replace him with somebody else, since the entire chain of command was basically founded on personal loyalties and who 'fathered' who. Since the Imperium was founded on military conquest, the mortar that held the Imperium together was that chain of command. Once that was corrupted, things went to hell in a handbasket. And because the Emperor basically was the Imperium, once Horus knocked him out of commission, there was no mechanism to handle the power vaccuum and things decayed even further.

To me, it's a little amusing that fascists fawn so much over the Emperor, since the moral I get from his story is that fascism doesn't work.
 
Really it seems to me that a lot of the arguing in this thread has been from the

"Chaos is still evil a f, but you can have internal opposition to the imperiun which isnt chaos"

And

"Chaos is less evil and is all the internal opposion to the imperium.)"

Camps talking past each other to some extent.
 
Sightedjt said:
Really it seems to me that a lot of the arguing in this thread has been from the

"Chaos is still evil a f, but you can have internal opposition to the imperiun which isnt chaos"

And

"Chaos is less evil and is all the internal opposion to the imperium.)"

Camps talking past each other to some extent.
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I was more: Chaos is no more or less evil than the Imperium, AND you can have internal opposition that isn't Chaos.
 
Horologer said:
As I understand it, the Horus Heresy is essentially in-universe proof of this.

First, the Emperor set himself up as the sole viable leader of the Imperium. And then he did himself one better by making Horus the leader of his entire war machine. Once Horus flipped to Chaos, there was no way to replace him with somebody else, since the entire chain of command was basically founded on personal loyalties and who 'fathered' who. Since the Imperium was founded on military conquest, the mortar that held the Imperium together was that chain of command. Once that was corrupted, things went to hell in a handbasket. And because the Emperor basically was the Imperium, once Horus knocked him out of commission, there was no mechanism to handle the power vaccuum and things decayed even further.

To me, it's a little amusing that fascists fawn so much over the Emperor, since the moral I get from his story is that fascism doesn't work.
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To be fair, no political structure seriously designed to work with the Emperor (an immortal being who had inhuman levels of charisma and a considerable degree of prescience as I recall) would have worked well without him. Even if there'd been, say, a procedure for electing someone else to fill his shoes, it wouldn't necessarily have worked very well at all.

I place more of the blame on the overreliance on dictatorial satraps, the primarchs, as what you might call a 'collective single point of failure,' without meaningful oversight. As I mentioned earlier, the Heresy could probably have been avoided or at least greatly mitigated if the Emperor had just sent astropathic messages and stayed in more regular contact with his sons.

Sightedjt said:
Really it seems to me that a lot of the arguing in this thread has been from the

"Chaos is still evil a f, but you can have internal opposition to the imperiun which isnt chaos"

And

"Chaos is less evil and is all the internal opposion to the imperium.)"

Camps talking past each other to some extent.
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Most of the arguing has been from the people who respond to a thread whose entire premise is "What if Chaos weren't uniformly super evil" by freaking out and going "BUT CHAOS IS SUPER EVIL!"

And I mean, I get it, Chaos being super evil IS one of the core premises of the setting as Games Workshop writes it, but the whole point here has been "I find the way GW writes it unsatisfying, because it's this nonstop message about how the best way possible for humanity is to grind boots in each others' faces, forever. I wonder if it'd be more satisfying if it we changed one of the core premises and flipped things around a bit?"

I think for some people this is a triggering idea that freaks them out, the idea that the jackboot might just not be necessary. That the Hard Man making the Hard Decision to blow up a planet because the rebels have sorcerers on their side might be on net, wrong.
 
My thibg is that if you want grey vs grey, that's fine and I can enjoy it. But charcoal vs vantablack isn't really that interesting. I don't care who wins. So adding a reformist faction within the imperium and toning down the vantablack on Chaos actually makes things more interesting because now theres stakes to care about rather than a choice between literal ultimate evil and a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.
 
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