Warhammer 40k General thread

I mean, he did let them be dumped all over the galaxy to be tortured so....

Also

Conquest? What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men. There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn.

Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool's crusade. No. Not glory, not conquest.

[...]

Angron's smile fades, wiped clean by his son's ignorance. None of them have ever understood. They were always so convinced that he should have been honoured by being given a Legion, when the life he chose was stolen from him the day the Imperium tore him away from his true brothers and sisters.
'I do not stand with Horus.' Angron breathes the confession. 'I stand against the Emperor. Do you understand, Kauragar? I am free now. Free. Can you not understand that? Why have you all spent these last decades telling me I should feel honoured to live as a slave, when I was so close to dying free?'

[...]

Angron. Angron. Angron. His name. A slave's name.

He walks through the ruins, enduring the cheers of his bloodstained followers – warriors concerned with glory and conquest, who were born better than the aliens and traitors they slay. Fighting their own kind is practically the first fair fight they have ever endured, and their gene-sire's lip curls at the thought.
Before he was shackled by the Emperor's will, Angron and his ragged warband defied armies of trained, armed soldiers on his home world. They tasted freedom beneath clean skies and razed the cities of their enslavers. Now he leads an army fattened by centuries of easy slaughter, and they cheer him the way his masters once cheered when he butchered beasts for their entertainment.

This is not freedom. He knows that. He knows it well. This is not freedom, he thinks as he stares at the World Eaters screaming his name. But the fight is only just beginning.

When the Emperor dies under his axes, when his final thought is of how the Great Crusade was all in pathetic futility, and when his last sight is Angron's iron smile... Then the Master of Mankind will learn what Angron has known since he picked up his first blade.

Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for.
It is why tyrants always fall.
I am fairly sure this is from Betrayer? Probably the best HH outside of first Heretic, Know no Fear or the original 3. Great stuff tho, you can tell writing is good when it gives stirring characterization to someone named Angron the angry space marine.
 
I am fairly sure this is from Betrayer? Probably the best HH outside of first Heretic, Know no Fear or the original 3. Great stuff tho, you can tell writing is good when it gives stirring characterization to someone named Angron the angry space marine.

It's actually from War Without End which I haven't gotten yet. What I quoted was part of the audiobook sample on Audible.

One cool thing about GW in the last few years is that they are making a huge effort to produce unabridged audiobook versions of all their novels, even some of the older ones like Gaunt's Ghosts.

I need to read First Heretic. I have a decent little collection of HH novels but my fickle nature made me wander off and get interested in some other stuff after reading the first three books.

What did I last buy....
The Flight of the Eisenstein
Fulgrim
Legion
Battle For the Abyss
Tales of Heresy
The First Heretic

There's a ton of books. I guess I'm just grateful that after Fulgrim you can just read whatever interests you. They had some mercy on my wallet.
 
Last edited:
The other I saw a post on r/40klore where someone ranked First Heretic as their number one. Cant say I disagee, First Heretic is so good.

Does anyone know how long an Eldar cycle lasts? Google gives me no answers.
 
There are some gems but it is fairly obvious that at some point GW realized people would buy anything they put out and thus stretched the story out to get the maximum number of novels in. *cough* Unremembered Empire *Cough*.
 
There are some gems but it is fairly obvious that at some point GW realized people would buy anything they put out and thus stretched the story out to get the maximum number of novels in. *cough* Unremembered Empire *Cough*.

And yet Horus fell to Chaos in 2 books in a most unconvincing and painfully rushed fashion.
 
I mean, he did let them be dumped all over the galaxy to be tortured so....

Also

Conquest? What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men. There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn.

Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool's crusade. No. Not glory, not conquest.

[...]

Angron's smile fades, wiped clean by his son's ignorance. None of them have ever understood. They were always so convinced that he should have been honoured by being given a Legion, when the life he chose was stolen from him the day the Imperium tore him away from his true brothers and sisters.
'I do not stand with Horus.' Angron breathes the confession. 'I stand against the Emperor. Do you understand, Kauragar? I am free now. Free. Can you not understand that? Why have you all spent these last decades telling me I should feel honoured to live as a slave, when I was so close to dying free?'

[...]

Angron. Angron. Angron. His name. A slave's name.

He walks through the ruins, enduring the cheers of his bloodstained followers – warriors concerned with glory and conquest, who were born better than the aliens and traitors they slay. Fighting their own kind is practically the first fair fight they have ever endured, and their gene-sire's lip curls at the thought.
Before he was shackled by the Emperor's will, Angron and his ragged warband defied armies of trained, armed soldiers on his home world. They tasted freedom beneath clean skies and razed the cities of their enslavers. Now he leads an army fattened by centuries of easy slaughter, and they cheer him the way his masters once cheered when he butchered beasts for their entertainment.

This is not freedom. He knows that. He knows it well. This is not freedom, he thinks as he stares at the World Eaters screaming his name. But the fight is only just beginning.

When the Emperor dies under his axes, when his final thought is of how the Great Crusade was all in pathetic futility, and when his last sight is Angron's iron smile... Then the Master of Mankind will learn what Angron has known since he picked up his first blade.

Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for.
It is why tyrants always fall.

I never said the Emperor was a good guy, but that he was far more nuanced in the old cannon and actually had some degree of compassion and empathy for others. THAT was the original tragedy of the post Heresy era, that the Emperor actually gave a shit about humans as opposed to the cult that followed him.

The HH books just turned into a full asshole and there´s hints he even planned a civil war between the legions to cull the primarchs and their legions after the Great Crusade. Even the Thunder Warriors being culled by him I think comes from the new cannon.
 
Last edited:
I am rapidly tiring of this discussion, you have repeatedly asserted that the Imperium of Man *definitely* isn't fascist and yet the only one to provide any traits of fascism is myself.

Dogmatically insisting that "true" Fascism cannot be decentralized at all is neither useful nor particularly compelling. Fascism is a type of ideology, it is not a government structure. There is nothing contradictory about a fascist state that is feudal out of necessity.
And the Eldar formed the Eye of Terror, the point was that they lasted an astronomically long time without any major Chaos incursion or horde.
I am rapidly tiring of this discussion, you have repeatedly asserted that the Imperium of Man *definitely* isn't fascist and yet the only one to provide any traits of fascism is myself.

Dogmatically insisting that "true" Fascism cannot be decentralized at all is neither useful nor particularly compelling. Fascism is a type of ideology, it is not a government structure. There is nothing contradictory about a fascist state that is feudal out of necessity.

You just love using memes.
Fascism has a very specific meaning and the Imperium utterly fails to meet it on account of being a semi-decentralized feudal federation allied with a sovereign power with numerous wholly independent subfactions within it which hold large sections of space with little to no direct oversight. Not only is all its territory structured in a feudal manner with lords and overlords passing taxes up the chain to the Administratum but it doesn't even have a unified economy, let alone a planned one. Which is one of the most important features of Fascism- everything is controlled by the state. The Imperium shares far more with Stalinism than it does Fascism, and even then it's an awful stretch.

(Ironically for all of SB's "le deus vult" memes, the Imperium shares more with the Ottoman Empire considering its usage of slaves and taking children to be raised from youth as the greatest soldiers in the empire. And even having said child soldier caste rebelling multiple times.)
 
The Imperium is fascist because it meets Umberto Eco's 14 Common Features of Fascism. Fascism doesn't stop being fascist just because it's partly feudal. You have been refusing to engage with everyone in the thread and it's extremely tiresome.
 
So, uh. Changing subject away from that.

What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

Barely related: TTS has its flaws, but it's still probably the best interpretation of 40k as a broad setting (i.e. not as a specific novel dealing with a specific event) we've had so far. I think you could do a lot with a version of 40k that focused more on the breadth of the setting, how in the grim darkness of the far future there are just a stunningly wide variety of ways to die horribly, but I don't see that kind of creativity coming out of 40k any time soon, no matter how well suited the setting would be to it.
 
Barely related: TTS has its flaws, but it's still probably the best interpretation of 40k as a broad setting (i.e. not as a specific novel dealing with a specific event) we've had so far. I think you could do a lot with a version of 40k that focused more on the breadth of the setting, how in the grim darkness of the far future there are just a stunningly wide variety of ways to die horribly, but I don't see that kind of creativity coming out of 40k any time soon, no matter how well suited the setting would be to it.
It's not the best version of 40k we've had so far because the best version of 40k we've had so far was just the original version of it which TTS is... intellectually informed by? It doesn't per se lift the tone or the themes or the narrative but the vibe is similar in some ethereal way.
 
What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.
I think a good word for the imperiums military power is theoretical, which fits because it sounds like a mix of theocracy and heretical. :V

But seriously, one of their things is that on paper they are the strongest faction in the galaxy by a wide margin, barring the unknown scale of the greater hive fleets.

The problem is that they are engaged in too many fronts and are riddled with too many internal problems to ever effectively use what they have.

It's why the Tau expansions or various ork Waaargh are not put down imediately. It takes them too long to mobilize a response and by the time they do, they realize there is another worse threat that needs their attention.
 
You mean, like, Rogue Trader? 40k 1e? That version was basically just space marines vs orks, it was a paper-thin setting with lots of hooks for expansion. That version had a lot of potential but hadn't yet really done anything with it.
 
What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

To be honest, this is really hard to tell due to GW's obsession with throwing big name groups into every event regardless of how little sense it makes.

I think a good word for the imperiums military power is theoretical, which fits because it sounds like a mix of theocracy and heretical. :V

But seriously, one of their things is that on paper they are the strongest faction in the galaxy by a wide margin, barring the unknown scale of the greater hive fleets.

The problem is that they are engaged in too many fronts and are riddled with too many internal problems to ever effectively use what they have.

It's why the Tau expansions or various ork Waaargh are not put down imediately. It takes them too long to mobilize a response and by the time they do, they realize there is another worse threat that needs their attention.

Yeah, that worked when (addressing the Tau specifically here; this is not a new rant) it was just forces that happened to be in the Eastern Fringe dealing with the Tau. Now, though; now we have the Imperium dragging forces in from across the galaxy, major ones who have more important things that they need to be doing (for example, multiple companies of the Raven Guard including both Captain Shrike and Chapter Master Severax when Deliverance itself is under threat from a massive Ork WAAAGH!, and at least two Brotherhoods of the White Scars (the 3rd Brotherhood (of the Eagle) and the 4th Brotherhood (of the Sword) after they've been recalled to Chogoris because Huron Blackheart is assaulting it directly), despite the fact that this is the explicit and exact opposite to how the Imperium responds to a situation (drawing in forces closer to a warzone first, rather than pulling them from across the galaxy, and especially not when they already have things they need to do and are in fact in the middle of doing). It's stopped being remotely believable as an explanation at this point, and is wearing thin even as an excuse.

I mean, if the Administratum tries to order an Astartes Chapter to stop defending its home world for anything other than a repeat of the battle of Terra, or the Beast's WAAAGH!, then they will literally be told to fuck off.
 
What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

I think it's to be expected.


Imagine trying to coordinate every military force on earth.
Multiply that by about a million.
Then remove the internet from the equation.

Efficiency is just not going to happen.
Then add dogmatic religious text that determine your tactics.
 
So, uh. Changing subject away from that.

What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

My understanding is that they have so much quantity at their disposal that they nearly always win when they're able to bring their full force to bear. But they only rarely get to do that, because of their incompetent leadership, corrupt and overcomplicated chain of command that in effect means that several of their armed forces are in an undeclared state of civil war, and decaying infrastructure.

The Imperium is slowly losing because with those handicaps, all they have going for them is numbers. And with their infrastructure falling apart and the understanding of much of their own technology having been lost, they can't build replacements for a lot of the stuff that gets destroyed in these attritional conflicts.
 
The 3e/4e era was when 40k's creativity petered out, when they added the last few genuinely new factions and right before they started recycling what they already had forever. It wasn't a bad era. But it was extremely self-serious and edgy.
 
The 3e/4e era was when 40k's creativity petered out, when they added the last few genuinely new factions and right before they started recycling what they already had forever. It wasn't a bad era. But it was extremely self-serious and edgy.
I might be in the minority here but I don't mind when 40k is self-serious or edgy as long as it's self-serious or edgy in a way that stays true to a few central themes. I think Rogue Trader was still fairly self-serious and edgy in its own way as well. To me while there's a notable distinction between Rogue Trader and 2nd/3rd or even bits of 4th edition they point in the same direction which I don't believe it necessarily the case when you compare rogue trader and say 8th edition. It's difficult to figure out exactly where the high water mark is here and you're going to have to either leave out good material or include bad material no matter where you draw the line but that's where I'd put it.

If I had to pick a specific year then I might go with 2006 but a general sort of 3rd/4th inclusive lets me take the bits I like and ignore the bits I don't :V
 
The 3e/4e era was when 40k's creativity petered out, when they added the last few genuinely new factions and right before they started recycling what they already had forever. It wasn't a bad era. But it was extremely self-serious and edgy.

Yeah, 40k could benefit from some new local xeno powers along the lines of the tau. Like, say...


The Scaubo are an ancient people who spread from system to system for millennia via sublight sleeper ships before their recent invention of a Geller field analogue. They underwent a series of conflicts to reunify their scattered peoples after the discovery of FTL travel, and have benefited from being in a distant corner of the galaxy where the Warp is relatively calm. Nonetheless, the new Scaubo Confederation is growing increasingly concerned with their navigator-equivalents becoming daemonhosts, and adopting a variety of countermeasures. Time will tell if any of them prove all that reliable. Most individual Scaubo system-states practice some form of representative democracy, but the Confederation as a whole is autocratic, with something of a power struggle going on between the conservative homeworld-based administrators and their increasingly autonomous military brass. Because of their monotreme-like physiology, Scaubo prefer warm climates, and tend to build down below a planet's surface just as much as they do upward. They've produced some great works of monumental art that are balanced half in and half out of great earthen hollows large enough to accomodate a small city.

Also, they eat children. A supervirus just wiped out their natural livestock species, and human children between the ages of three and ten are the only other thing with the needed biochemistry to sustain them. Despite having a diverse culture with many rich religious traditions, they all agree that vat-grown meat and artificial nutrient supplements are a mortal sin.
 
What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

Finished Severina Raine: Honourbound the other day. Good book! It's not Sharpe as Gaunt as I expected it, it's far more morose and self introspecting, and while Raine isn't my favorite Comissar by a long shot (she only has one book and a couple short stories not really her fault), I would like to see more of her. Also she's written by a woman and GW should do well to hire more women instead of the same 12 old white dudes to do the lore. :V

Anyway, in that book, by the end of the story, the Lord Militant General of the Crusade gets BLAMMED for NECROMANCY and the fact that corruption was that deep is the equivalent of a US Army General selling intel to Syria or something. That's a pretty big yikes for any military force let alone something as religiously charged as a crusade. This is probably isn't the first time that happens either!

In short, as the lore states, when the military can accomplish something, they accomplish it well enough. But it's stiffled by byzantine laws, outdated traditions, and religious superstition. It's very much one of those things that can't change about 40k. It is both a crumbling empire and too big too fail, simply because that would take a lot from the setting as established by ye olde Rogue Trader.

Also, all their literal angels come back to haunt them and wreck shit up constantly doesn't help.
 
What's the Sufficient Velocity consensus on the Imperium of Man's military capability? I have a rant on the Imperium's inefficacy in me somewhere, but I don't want to bother typing it out if it's old news.

A self self-sustaining and barely coherent juggernaut only realy comparably to the orks.

It's currently the strongest power in the galaxy, and can win any fight it fully commits to, however the number of independent threats ranging from minor to existential means that it almost never gets the chance to.

The mechanisms to recruit and arm guardsman are the only thing that seems to work at any real consistency, so the amount of soldiers they can send at a threat is generally "yes" but special forces (space marines, inquisitors, titans) are in limited supply to reduce the manpower requirements for any task. The hardware side of things has been in a gradual decline for the last 10k years with any new tech talink far to long to deploy, and knowledge hording by the Ad-Mech accelerating data losses.

Ironically, the only thing keeping small/fledgling alien nations (Craftworld Eldar, Tau) alive by virtue of being such a big target that scouring alien forces (Orks, Tyranids) can't wipe entire sections of the galaxy clean.
 
No, fascism has a "very specific definition" only if you want to define fascism poorly. The fascist ideologies of the early 20th century were not homogenous, they had a variety of ideals and government structures. It's far more practical to define fascism by the common characteristics of its adherents.

Furthermore, I already addressed this, the Imperium is not decentralized because it wants to be. It's a product of the logistical problems of having an empire that size. Using it as evidence that they are not fascist is fallacious, it would be like asserting that Nazi Germany wasn't genocidal because it failed to completely exterminate the Jewish race. A lack of capability is not the same thing as a lack of intent.

I am not aware of any definition of fascism that does not cover the IoM, and any that doesn't is almost certainly worthless. If you compare the Imperium of Man to fascist states like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and others the similarities are clear.

I think the imperium lacks the core ideals of fascism to be actually fascist, but has enough of the trappings that it is easy to read fascism into it, although, ironically, the imperium is more fascist under guilliman than it was before. Ultimately though, they lack the concept of the popular will through which the supreme leader is to embody in the face of intense bureaucracy. It isn't solving the issues of economic turmoil through intense subversion to the will of the state.

There is more to fascism than the racism and brutality and cult of violent death. It's all consuming submission to the will of the nation embodied by the state, through the will of a supreme leader. There is an ideology there.

that all said, most of GW's writers are hardly historians or political scientists and fascism is an easy mine, for good or ill.
Good thing that no one is doing that.

I am using the common traits of fascism as defined by Umberto Eco.

There is no "technical definition of being fascist", the term is not one that has a neat definition. You're obviously right that utilizing an excessively broad definition is not useful, but it's just as bad to use a hyper-restricted definition.

Actually, when you take into account Eco's definition, ironically the protagonists of many imperium based books are more fascist than the general governance of the imperium. Fascism doesn't play well with stratified bureaucracies that are the obstacle many an imperial hero has to cut away, often violently, to get things really done.



Now, it is possible that the imperium is roughly the shape that a fascist nation will settle in to provided the time to do so, but, I dunno, fascism is such a volatile ideology that I'm not sure there can ever be a stable enough fascist state that manages more than a generation. Certainly no fascist state in reality has survived much longer than that. Even the Iberian fascists didn't outlive their leaders for long.


I do think examinations of fascism through the lens of fiction are interesting though, particularly since, well, none of the authors or creators of 40k are, themselves, fascists. How did so much of the trappings of fascism sneak into 40k? Why did it start to lose the satire? Why are so many of the heroes even more fascist than the state they are fighting to support?
I am rapidly tiring of this discussion, you have repeatedly asserted that the Imperium of Man *definitely* isn't fascist and yet the only one to provide any traits of fascism is myself.

Dogmatically insisting that "true" Fascism cannot be decentralized at all is neither useful nor particularly compelling. Fascism is a type of ideology, it is not a government structure. There is nothing contradictory about a fascist state that is feudal out of necessity.

I do think you're wrong here. Ideologies coincide with certain structures. Liberalism seeks out certain political structures. Fascism does the same. Fascism is a political structure, you can't have really have a non totalitarian fascist state. Totalitarianism is required to be fascist, and a totalitarian government only has so many forms. Further, the veneration of the will of the volk embodied by the leader trends super hard to autocracy, and the ideal fascist state is an autocratic one. You can't drain these out of fascism and keep it fascist.
Avoiding the rabbit hole.

Personally, i think the best stories from the universe are either
  • Partially comedic (Cain Archives)
  • Emphasise the plight of the common man/Eldar who isn't one of the big named character either trying to live their lives
  • Focus on people trying to rationalise the horrible decisions they make, and seeing the internal contradictions manifest and bite them in the arse. (commander who callously abandons his troops see's everything he has burn, dark eldar trying to understand romance, Tau chafing under the constraints of the greater good)
  • Humanise the unlikable characters (chaos, dark eldar), them remind you how horrible they actually are.
The thing i hate most would be faction invincibility.

Chaos: Never really losing anything in story and not really having a loose condition. The Dark gods are perfectly safe and unthreatened. Demon Princedom is the best immortality in the verse. Chaos Space marines and cultists are an effectively limitless resource and demons and dark mechanicus provide an infinite supply of special equipment. There's never a sence that the faction suffers any loses that matter, and the same force will always come back no matter the defeat.
  • Necrons loose tombworlds and its a big loss to the forces they have available, and they have to awaken soon otherwise the galaxy will be lost to them (Nids Chaos)
  • Tyranids loosing a hive fleet is a loss of genetic potential that they have to recover from. Even they are worried about the galaxy becoming non-viable (Chaos), and enough gun will stop them.
  • Orks are reliant on a Big Warboss to unify them, so the loss of any major warboss is a big setback to their threat factor. But they don't really care

But Chaos demons have no avenue to be weakened as a faction or reason to be concerned about the state of the galaxy. A nameless/Fodder Chaos lord getting stopped doesn't weaken Chaos nearly as much as the 5 systems and 10 Gaurd regiments that died before the space marines showed up.

Tau: Their small size means that they can never faec a major loss otherwise they'll cease to exist as a faction. As such they just keep getting handed victories over forces that should have rolled them for plot reasons

I mean, chaos space marines really shouldn't be as unlimited as the literature makes them out to be, but it's the nature of the fiction to utilize a contrast in numbers between the hordes of bad guys fighting the few proud heroes. It's sort of baked into our society, and one way to show the depravity of an enemy is a disregard to the amount of soldiers he sacrifices. Ironic because the imperium is noted to spend the lives of its soldiers easily, but imperial protagonists are almost always the ones that stand against the wanton sacrifice of their men.

It's pretty hard to blame the Imperium for being the way they are when you look at their history, and the kind of threats they face.

It was written to be a dystopian setting after all.

Has anyone ever written an AU where the Emperor reveals himself during the DAOT, the technology is never lost, and there is no Horus Heresy?

I mean hard to blame in the sense that it is fictional and never had a choice in how it was supposed to be, but in setting it did not need to be the way it is, and, like, the setting has gone through authorial telephone. The satire sort of fell away.


And the imperium under the emperor was actually turbo fascist.
The other I saw a post on r/40klore where someone ranked First Heretic as their number one. Cant say I disagee, First Heretic is so good.

Does anyone know how long an Eldar cycle lasts? Google gives me no answers.

Yeah, but first heretic is about the worst primarch.

I never said the Emperor was a good guy, but that he was far more nuanced in the old cannon and actually had some degree of compassion and empathy for others. THAT was the original tragedy of the post Heresy era, that the Emperor actually gave a shit about humans as opposed to the cult that followed him.

The HH books just turned into a full asshole and there´s hints he even planned a civil war between the legions to cull the primarchs and their legions after the Great Crusade. Even the Thunder Warriors being culled by him I think comes from the new cannon.

I think the ultimate issue is that the emperor and the early imperium was just better when left as a bit of a mystery. It's clear now that there was probably never a good state for the imperium to end in.

Although you can read some tragedy in the idea that, as a fascist leader, the second the emperor tried to steer from the course of autocracy and fascism, his military threw a bitch fit and blew everything up.

The Imperium is fascist because it meets Umberto Eco's 14 Common Features of Fascism. Fascism doesn't stop being fascist just because it's partly feudal. You have been refusing to engage with everyone in the thread and it's extremely tiresome.

I think it actually fails on point 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13. The imperium is really not populist, and there's no real attempt to embody a popular will in the leadership of the imperium. Even the idea that everyone is educated to be a hero rings hollow as the vast majority of the imperium is, in fact, kept completely stratified and discouraged from conceiving of living better.

Imperial protagonists, again, ironically tend to be more fascist than the state they operate in.
 
Although you can read some tragedy in the idea that, as a fascist leader, the second the emperor tried to steer from the course of autocracy and fascism, his military threw a bitch fit and blew everything up.

It was more his choir boy of a son Lorgar that threw a bitchfest about the whole affair.
 
It was more his choir boy of a son Lorgar that threw a bitchfest about the whole affair.

Lorgar being a traitor would be meaningless if the military of the imperium wasn't primed to go rogue the second it looked like the Emperor has turned away from conquest. I mean, it's a failing built into a militaristic state that you can't use your military to build an empire and then just... put it away. The generals will burn everything down rather than lose power, so ultimately it is the emperor's fault for building the empire in the way he did, even if he planned to kill all the soldiers in a civil war anyways (which, by the way, is a stupid ass plan cause, as we see in the setting, oops your rebels are actually winning you dumb fuck, what now?).
 
Back
Top