Horus Heresy

With all the rich lore and cannon that goes into the Imperium, I am frankly stupefied at how utterly thin and preposterous the motivation for the Horus Heresy was.

Its just fucking mind bogglingly stupid.

So you're dad fucked off back to terra for a while and told you he had something he had to keep secret from you for while.

Did you ever stop to think how fucking preposterous this is? The Primarchs were fucking IMMORTAL. The emperor should have been able to tell them to wait another 10,000 years, it shouldn't have made one bit of bit of difference.

What kind of emotionally regressed CHILD would start falling apart at the seems cause their daddy has been gone for more than 5 minutes?

In a setting so fucking rich with incredible artwork, thematic nuance, catholic symbolism and dark age rhetoric, the Horus Heresy, (and pretty much all GW's narrative fiction) just absolutely sickens me with its incredible waste of fucking potential.

Horus was corrupted by Chaos by not 1, not 2 but 3 separate means.

I mean, just step back for a second.

Is the emperor a good person?

NO!

He is a fucking monster! He is everything that is wrong with humanity. He represents our pride, our selfishness, our arrogance. He is incapable of empathy, incapable of love, he places his own ego and his own self interest above everyone and everything.

He encourages genocide, fascism, war, tyranny, and endless, unfathomable HATRED.

He is the incarnation of order run amok, overbearing and uncompromising authority shitting over everything that is good and pure in the galaxy.

If the emperor had his way, not a single flower would grow without his say so, not a single child would laugh without his permission. He has no sense of humor, humility, spontaneity or mirth. He was the corpse emperor long before he ever ascended to the golden throne.

The primarchs had EVERY fucking reason to rebel, every part of them that was good and decent and human knew that they had been inducted into his cult of personality and that he was not humanities savior, but in fact its damnation.

He was not a just king, he had no right to rule save that right by which he took by force. The people never loved the emperor, but in fact, feared him, loathed him, spat on his name and cursed him in their dreams.

Warhammer 40k is dark satire and ultraviolence, and should not be treated as serious, internally consistent worldbuilding.

>With all the rich lore and cannon that goes into the Imperium

40k isnt subtle and i find that hilarious.
and emps being everything wrong with humanity wasn't either

>With all the rich lore and cannon that goes into the Imperium

>it shouldn't have made one bit of bit of difference.

The Primarchs were, fundamentally, human. They weren't brainwashed with hypno-indoctrination like the rank-and-file Marines were. Accordingly, they had doubts, worries, hatreds, jealousies, all the full range of character flaws and negative traits expressed by humanity. The Emperor either didn't know this or didn't care, and treated them as if they were tools or weapons, to be used according to his whims alone. Just look at Angron - the Emperor, to all intents and purposes, enslaved him. After having been brought up a slave, how on earth would Angron respond well to that, or not wish to rebel if the chance emerged? Or Perturabo, who wanted to build things like Dorn or Guilliman, but was forced into endless, grinding siege after siege because no-one else wanted such ugly, inglorious work.

It is entirely unreasonable to expect the Primarchs to just shrug their shoulders and get on with things. They were people, they had emotions, and they lashed out when the Emperor mistreated them.

The Horus Heresy should have been about the curse of their fathers pride. Deep down, the Primarchs all KNEW that the emperor was tyrant, and that they were all a part of it, and that it was, and always has been morally and objectively WRONG.

Each of the primarchs might have held within them a spark, a hope of a better way, a world without kings, dictators and emperors. They might have each had their own vision of what such a universe might be like.

The curse of their fathers pride is what set them to ruin, because the truth is none of them could face what they had become. None of their dreams could ever reach fruition because of their inherited hubris.

THAT, should have been the primarchs downfall, and Horus' undoing. Their inability to relinquish power, to let go of control, to abate their own ego's, to let go of their own visions of what was best for humanity and do what they knew was right.

but my point is that they didn't behave like ADULTS, much less immortal god like beings that supposed possessed unmatched wit and intelligence.

Their motivation for rebellion was razor fucking thin. There were plenty of complex, moral and even personal reasons they might have rebelled, but the reasons chosen by the authors were so fucking unbelievably petty that they literally make comic book bro-tier drama and political asswashing look like fucking masterwork literature by comparison.

>Their inability to relinquish power, to let go of control, to abate their own ego's

That sort of is the case, though. One of the reasons why Horus rebelled was because he saw the planets his Legion had been conquered being handed over to normal humans. When the Emperor returned to Terra, he imagined a galaxy where mortals ruled over Primarchs and Marines in his place, and couldn't stand the idea.

Also, when the Emperor no longer needed the Thunder Warriors, he had them all destroyed. The Great Crusade was reaching its end, and if any of the Primarchs knew about what happened to the Thunder Warriors, they might have wondered about what lay ahead when the Emperor no longer needed them either.

I mean, I know its 40k, and 40k is not meant to be taken super seriously and is satire and all that, but I don't think anyone who's ever played warhammer 40k has been sucked in at one point by the sheer scope, granduer, and majesty of the setting, regardless of how fucking stupid it can be.

So you know, just give a bro a break and let me take something WAAAY to fucking seriously for a moment and mourn over what could have been something that truly felt epic instead of rehashed mish mash of regurgitated horseshit that was the horus heresy.

But it wasn't Horus' IDEAL's that lead him to rebel it was his own ego. A relatable, interesting and well developed character should have been driven by his morality, not some stupid cobra commander vainglorious bullshit about not being in charge anymore.

He should have rebelled because he saw the emperor and what he stood for as being morally wrong, he should have been inspired by his virtue to rebel, not his own selfish desires.

What causes a paladin to fall is doing what he believes is right and just when he is in fact betraying his principles.

Having a paladin fall because he simply decides one day to give in to temptation and be selfish is unsatisfying, it reeks of pretense and author artiface.

> the reasons chosen by the authors were so fucking unbelievably petty

Were they, now? Let's run through them.

>Horus
Rebelled because of his pride. Couldn't stand the idea of the galaxy being ruled by mortals instead of Marines. Also, corruption from an external source - if it hadn't been for the Davanite cult, this might only have stewed as a lasting resentment, and never come out the way it did.

>Night Haunter
Unbalanced right from the word go. Forced to watch his homeworld slide back into the mess he had dragged it out from, and forced to surround himself with the sort of people he despised. 'Rebelled' even before the Heresy - the Night Lords would have gone rogue one way or the other no matter what happened.

>Lorgar
Lorgar was desperate for someone to believe in. He needed a deity figure to make sense of the galaxy. The Emperor might have weaned him off this with time, but instead, humiliated him in front of the most successful Legion and destroyed his crowning achievement. I doubt most people would respond well to their god spitting in their face. There's an element of external corruption here as well, since it was Kor Phaeron who introduced him to Chaos.

>Peturabo, Angron
Already covered.

Cont. next post.

I guess the problem with writing a truly interesting story would be the fandom. I think most of them are just too damn thick to understand the subtlety behind the satire, they actually are kind of on board with the fascist attitude and simplistic, mind numbingly dull novels and story plots.

>Magnus
Road to hell, good intentions, etc etc. Magnus endlessly tried to do the right thing, but fell foul of his own ego. He couldn't see the trap he was walking into - Tzeentch was manipulating him right from the word go.

>Mortarion
This one, I'll admit, is a bit thin. I've always found the motivations for his betrayal a bit thin. The core of it is that when the Emperor returned to Terra, he began to draw equations between that and the distant, brutal rulers of his homeworld, but it always felt like a bit of a leap. I'll conced this one.

>Fulgrim
External corruption and nothing but. He was possessed by a Daemon weapon, and when he eventually regained control over himself, was irredeemably tainted and warped mentally.

>Alpharius
This one's trickier, since there's so many possibilities. Either he turned traitor because he wanted to defeat Chaos (at the expense of destroying humanity), or because he wanted to prove himself better than his older, more favored brothers and saw unseating the Emperor as the greatest test of his skills. Because there's so little we really know about Alpharius for sure, I'll concede this as well.

So no, I don't think their motivations were childish. They might be badly written, and they might come across as childlike, but that's the fault of Black Library's authors ranging from poor to mediocre, with a couple of exceptions that creep up into the realms of 'okay'. Once you examine the underlying motivations behind their individual betrayals, no, I don't think they're at all unfounded or unreasonable.

Chaos corruption is a helluva drug, you know.

Khorneholio? Is that you?

Reigns that start in blood usually end in them. Like Hamlet, the Emperor built his kingdom on blood by destroying all opposition. He taught his sons well and it's no surprise that his sons did the same to him.

That's because they were etiher: Spoiled brats taken in the by the royal family of their home world given everything they wanted and being told they could do everything because they were incredible.

Or had a traumatic childhood exposed to horrifying experiences or odds in which they had to overcome.

The result of either is that the individual does not grow up because they don't have a reason to develop certain skills or they don't get a chance to develop them healthily and have to make a jump to a sense of adulthood or die, without learning the skills to behave correctly.

I'm no psychologist or anything. just my observation on the world and fiction.

this game was complete shit . I denounce it entirely.

Oh come on, thats just fucking stupid.

What I mean is, why did Horus even WANT to be in charge? He didn't have any kind of complex character motivations aside from power = good. Horus had no connection to mortal humans, he had no interest or investment in them, he didn't even have any goals to put such power and authority to good use besides further conquest.

Why would he even fucking WANT power and authority over mankind?

But thats what I mean, their motivations were so juvenile. All any of them ever wanted was power for its own sake, they never delved into any of the insecurities or motivations that made them WANT power.

Their sense of morality is so utterly childlike, they have no conception of ethics outside of "might makes right". I've seen deeper motivations out of the Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch as a kid.

Thats a fairly accurate assessment, but my beef isn't with their backgrounds, its with their characterization. The novels constantly aggrandize their behaviors and motivations without ever once capitulating how childish and immature they really are, they are constantly skewing the context to make them seem like they are these incredibly complex, deep characters instead of actually fleshing out their motivations and personalities.

I like to think that the Horus Heresy stories are just that... stories. The full details of everything that happened is lost to history. Let's be honest, this setting treats 10,000 years like it was last month.

that just makes their trangression all the more egregious. Good settings are hard to come by, wasting thier potential on poorly written stories should be a crime.

It helps if you think of Horus as Napoléon Bonaparte in SPAAAAAAAAAACE.

>the iconic conflict of a setting for manchildren was precipitated by manchildren being manchildren
Seems pretty appropriate desu.

t. Chaos

But it doesn't HAVE to be for manchildren.

>the motivation for the Horus Heresy

Based Rick Priestley tells us that the HH was a reimagining of the fall of Lucifer & Co as set out in Milton's Paradise Lost (if the story was recounted by a manic street preacher on a corner in Megacity One). All of Veeky Forums's Dr Phil pop psych analysis and Oprahesque clucking about "parenting skills" miss the point entirely and serve only make the post's authors look pretty fucking stupid. Which brings us full circle to you, OP ...

So the entire Horus heresy could be a bunch of half mad dribble written on one street wall?