Is the Emperor good?

Yes, but he's not the merciful kind of good.

what you're saying is optimistic and i wish you were right but it's actually just GW being bad at writing

More like old testament good than new.

He is all into his smiting of smut.

ND wouldn't last very long in his presence

>The Emperor and the Primarchs are by far the worst parts of the whole HH, because human beings cannot into writing posthuman ubermench.
This. I got the 2nd Horus Heresy book and fuck I hate how Horus is written in it. First he's a total bro and then suddenly lel I kill yoo xd xd xd
Well, I guess Horus died on Davin.

This.

Empy well written is beautiful and tragic.

Everyone is bad guy in 40k, stop this shit already

he was as good as his surroundings allowed him to be

I thunk pic related is pretty much on point on the subject.

Ultimately yes because his end goal was peace and prosperity for a united Human race. And he spent 10,000 years in agony to protect humanity. But yeah, his arrogance and hubris cost him.

The Emperor was a conquererm...
Different from Horus (in his good times) he was xenophobic

>And Chaosfags worship Horus for this.

Obviously. Just look at His teachings.

That image ignores a lot of the really, really, really stupid shit the Emperor pulled because it ruins the idea that everything just fell apart despite the Emperor. Nikaea was a colossal mistake that fully turned one legion to the traitor's side, any idiot with even a modicum of sense would realize that Angron and Curze were going to be trouble before long, and the way the whole Lorgar/Chaos situation was handled was beyond retarded.

As depicted in the HH series he is a caricature of an internet Fedora-lord going full autist.

Add to this being the most powerful but stable and sane psyker in human history.

Add to that a master race mentality dialled up to 11.

So no. By every measure he is bad. Bad in his hypocrisies, bad in his statesmanship, a bad diplomat, a bad man by any modern sense of ethics or morality and an all around bad human. By which I mean he is a bad human and bad at being a human.

The HH tries to claim he is best at everything ever but all we see is a petulant child with powers of a hellenic god. The only way to bring the two together in a cohesive way is to think of it as the Dear Leader of North Korea in the far future.

Neither Angron or Curze were responsible for the Horus Heresy. The one mistake that the Emperor was treating the Primarchs as men instead of children that needed to be babysat and consoled.

>The HH tries to claim he is best at everything
This never happened. In fact, every claim to this has been made by a post-Heresy source, written by an Imperium that's completely dominated by the Ecclesiarchy and has had thousands of years of historical purging and revision. Faggots are just mad their Baptist interpretation of 40k lore isn't accurate.

>As depicted in the HH series he is a caricature of an internet Fedora-lord going full autist
Basically every religion he started turned genocidal over the opinions of one man interpreting his teachings against another

>Add to this being the most powerful but stable and sane psyker in human history.
No shit. Psykers were the Big E's ultimate endgame plan for Humanity, but the visible psykers now were all unstable outliers and walking Chaos portals.

>Add to that a master race mentality dialled up to 11.
When the Fall happened and the Human Empire collapse, every single xeno species that enjoyed the protection of DAoT Humanity immediately turned on their protectors. Bartering and treating humanity like cattle or merchandise. Big E's simply looking out No.1.

>Psykers were the Big E's ultimate endgame plan for Humanity
Not true. They were a stopgap measure until the Human Webway portal could be built. But after that project collapsed, an alternative was needed.

>Angron and Curze were going to be trouble before long
And yet they were still his children. They were born from parts of him. They WERE him, in some ways, or were aspects of him.

Which raises the question of what the two lost Primarchs did that finally made him cross that line. It took ultimate realisation of everything Horus was and had done to make him cross it with him.

Perhaps the two lost Primarchs were why he took so long against Horus, or in dealing with the Heresy. He lost two of his children. Could he accept losing a third?

Isn't there still that fluff about humanity being in the middle of developing into a fully psychic race?

Sure, a human Webway would remove reliance on the Warp, but humanity is still evolving, the Emperor is still the end point of that evolution. A race of Emperor-level beings.

>bad in his statesmanship
running and maintaining a galaxy wide Empire single handely is quite a feat though

>a bad diplomat
He didn´t bulldozer his way through the Great Crusade only ya know. To successfully annex whole worlds without bloodshed is pretty good.

>a bad man by any modern sense of ethics or morality
When the galaxy only wants to enslave/kill off every human, the normal thing to do is to drop your SJW beliefs.

>all around bad human
I agree.When you literally are a walking god amongst peasants for 30000 years you probably lose sense on basic human needs.

>Basically every religion he started turned genocidal over the opinions of one man interpreting his teachings against another

So he decided to start a totally-not-religion personality cult, skip all the benefits that a benevolent faith brings and just jump straight to the fanatical genocide.

>. Psykers were the Big E's ultimate endgame plan for Humanity, but the visible psykers now were all unstable outliers and walking Chaos portals.

Psychic powers on a large scale is not a viable evolutionary path for humanity. Psykers are not a survival trait in a universe with thirsting gods who think they are delicious. A psychic caste would have been better. Culling them to keep the lighthouse shining is probably one of the more beneficial things the Imperium is doing for humanities long term survival. Sad though it is.

>When the Fall happened and the Human Empire collapse, every single xeno species that enjoyed the protection of DAoT Humanity immediately turned on their protectors. Bartering and treating humanity like cattle or merchandise. Big E's simply looking out No.1.

Humanity was having Terminator + Zombie + Demon + Mad Max apocalypse at the time. can't see us making friends easily in that rabid dog state.

Also the Emperor's method of negotiating access to the webway with the elder can be summed up thusly.

>Give me knowledge and access to your greatest strategic asset, demilitarize all of your forces and submit to a registration as an Imperial vassal people.

So whats in it for us?

>I won't exterminate you all to the last man woman and child today.

No thanks.

>Foul Xeno! Your treachery knows no bounds and you are now destined for extinction at our hands!

>Neither Angron or Curze were responsible for the Horus Heresy
No, but leaving Angron in charge of a legion was absolutely retarded, and it was obvious that both of them had some troubling shit going on.
>The one mistake that the Emperor was treating the Primarchs as men instead of children that needed to be babysat and consoled.
But he didn't treat them like men. He generally tried to treat them as inhuman automatons that would do what he wanted without questioning, or feeling, or thinking. The Emperor's biggest mistake was that he kept shit secret when he shouldn't have. Hey, Magnus, Lorgar, there are some evil xenos creatures in the warp that like to trick people and may or may not have a personal vendetta against us due to me double crossing them. Hey, Horus, I need you to take over the Crusade so that I can completely revolutionize our means of space travel. Boom, Heresy averted.

Except the Emperor apparently gave exactly zero shits about the Wolves going renegade and trying to murder Magnus. BL doesn't need apologists trying to excuse their shitty writing.

Not so fast. Had Emps let slip the Web way project before everything was in place, the entirety of the imperium's navigators would have quit on the spot, stranding billions in the warp or in various systems with no means to resupply. They go into this in the new scar book, path of heaven

I really live the fact that one author did more to explain dumb fluff in one book that 10 years of HH combined.

>running and maintaining a galaxy wide Empire single handely is quite a feat though

Malcador and his administrators ran the Imperium.

>He didn´t bulldozer his way through the Great Crusade only ya know. To successfully annex whole worlds without bloodshed is pretty good.
Saying Join me willingly or receiver Nukes/Thunder Warriors/Space Marines is not diplomatic finesse.

>When the galaxy only wants to enslave/kill off every human, the normal thing to do is to drop your SJW beliefs.
SJW beliefs are anything other than multiple genocides now?

>When you literally are a walking god amongst peasants for 30000 years you probably lose sense on basic human needs.
I'll agree with you on that one. But he had people to advise him who did understand basic human needs. He just chose to ignore them because what they were saying didn't fit his world view and he was unadaptable.

...

I've got this somewhere, not sure if it's accurate, but whatever.

Of course he is protecting the mortal realms from the gods of chaos.
Thats a pretty fucking good deed imo
(sanguinor picture is irreverent but it looked good.)

I think its a matter of view
I have indulged myself for 4 Years in the Lore of 40K and it got pretty philosphical.

The Imperium says that the Emperor is the one true God of humanity and the savior with the ultimate masterplan

Chaos in opposion says that the Corpse-Emperor is the ultimate Dictator and all his Actions are only to extictinct, replace or enslave humainity.

>Isn't there still that fluff about humanity being in the middle of developing into a fully psychic race?

Yes, in every BRB since 4th ED. You casual scum should just jump back to /v/ where you belong.

In 999 41K, humanity is on the brink of a species wide psychic evolution that will result in a golden age of wonderment and an age of Eternal Chaos. The Emperor is guiding humanity through this evolution while Chaos seeks to hijack it.

>Psychic powers on a large scale is not a viable evolutionary path for humanity. Psykers are not a survival trait in a universe with thirsting gods who think they are delicious. A psychic caste would have been better. Culling them to keep the lighthouse shining is probably one of the more beneficial things the Imperium is doing for humanities long term survival. Sad though it is.

see This is your last warning casuals. I am sick of your shit. Go back to /v/

The resulting new psychic race of humanity would be resistant to Chaos and won't need the Emperor to protect them. Think Perpetuals.

The Emperor in this new stupid fluff is not Chaos proof.

He has the best interests of humanity at heart, but it still fucks over a lot of people.

Of course he is you fucking heretic

>Wolves going renegade and trying to murder Magnus

Not true fagtron, Horus told Russ to kill Magnus and since Horus was the fucking Warmaster he believed him

So Russ did the will of a traitor and weakened the Imperial war effort considerably as a result.

Ignorance is no excuse.

You're a moron, no one knew that Horus was a traitor at that point

The Emperor in this new stupid fluff will simply go kaputz when he finally croaks and all the galaxy will be torn apart in warp storm eternity.

What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

This is the Imperium. Ignorance is not an excuse. Innocence is irrelevant.

Russ fucked up to a degree that would have landed anyone else the penal legion at best, death sentence most probable and servitorhood at worst.

The fact of the matter is, even despite new fluff and the retarded novels, the Emperor tried to get all of humanity from underneath a hard place to becoming master of the hard place - turning the galaxy from the great devourer of human souls to mankind's bitch slave. What he had to do to make this impossible feat possible, the lives ruined in the process, the races and civilizations destroyed to achieve it, and whatever damnation the future holds pales in comparison to the only other alternative for the galaxy; being a neverending Old Night without hope.

And thats really what the Emperor represents - hope. Hope that one day, all this madness will end.

By your logic, Guilliman is guilty of slaughtering his own legion for marshaling his legion to Calth.

I haven't read that book but Dorn, had he been anyone else, would have been relieved of command after the Iron Cage.

I thought you were discussing the logic of association with Horus' actions, not general ineptitude.

Both performed actions that cost the Imperium dear. Both got away Scott free.

New fluff? Fucking newfag that's from 3th ED and gets copypasted all the way to 7th ED.

Get out, /v/!

They were damned to be protectors of a realm which has lost its Emperor, doomed to die untimely and bloody deaths in the embrace of their enemies.

Doran didn't have to do the Iron Cage. That was him being a retard.

You're a fucking retard

Terrible and powerful Emperor! We, your unworthy servants, give praise! For only through your grace and benevolence may we truly reach enlightenment! And deserve our praise you do, for we are one! Ere you ascended, you walked among us, great Emperor, not as god, but as man!"
"To you we give praise! We are but maggots, writhing in the filth of our own corruption! While you have ascended from the dung of mortality, and now walk among the stars!"

"But you were once man! Aye! And as man, you said, 'Let me show you the power of Empire, born of the Terra, where my breath is long winter.' 'I breathe now, in royalty, and reshape this land which is mine. I do this for you, Red Legions, for I love you. Aye, love. Love! Even as man, great Emperor cherished us. For he saw in us, in each of us, the future of Mankind! The future of Galaxy! And there it is, friends! The ugly truth! We are the children of man! Emperor is the true god of man! Ascended from flesh, to rule the realm of spirit! The very idea is inconceivable to our Xeno enemies! Sharing the heavens with us? With man? Ha! They can barely tolerate our presence in Galaxy! Today, they take away your faith. But what of tomorrow? What then? Do the Xenos take your homes? Your businesses? Your children? Your very lives? So rise up! Rise up, children of the Empire! Embrace the word of mighty Emperor, he who is both man and Divine!"

"For we are the children of man! And we shall inherit the heavens and earth! And we, not the Xenos or their toadies, will rule Galaxy! Forever!"

He's an evil little shit, but so is everyone else.

No. "Good" is the Emperor

>running and maintaining a galaxy wide Empire single handely is quite a feat though

No, it's just plain stupid. Hire bureaucrats to do that for you. You're the superhero/god-king so go punch Chaos in the face and leave administration to bean counters.

Magnus knew and told his dad.
Dad gave Russ orders to bring Magnus along.
Russ listened to Horus instead.
Well done wolf fag.

Evil? Questionable. Little? I fucking doubt it.

Epic come back bro.

Please tell us how Dorn being told that the Iron Cage was a trap then walking into is intentionally wasn't a stupid idea.

He had the best of intentions is all I can say. Had to do some evil to move towards the better good, over estimated the few people he could almost call a peer.

In the end he was just a person and made mistakes.

Of course he didn't have to but saw it as a giant pain glove to test his legion against. Look at Amit after the codex crisis, he was bitter as fuck but didn't have his own primarch to look to and Dorn saw that almost all his legionnaires would have held the haborred the same feelings.

And regardless on how fucked up the Imleriums current t state is, the galaxy is 1000 times better than it was in the Old Night for people

He wanted to build a religion that wasn't based off of idols and gods because chaos usually found a way to slip in there and corrupt it.

This. However, even if he was not to tell them about the Webway project, Emps should've most certainly told Magnus and Lorgar about Chaos once he got to meet them. Those two had the highest probability of getting involved in a Chaos fuckup.

So he decided to set up something that idolized himself as a totally-not-god-honest-you-guiz.

Everyone who saw through the Emperor's glamour though he was shit. One man even went so far as to weigh the options and decided burning to death was a better option than being on his side. This is a big part of why.

The Emperor had Russ rally his entire legion, an army of Custodes and Silent Sisters, and a massive warfleet to take Magnus in. He knew Magnus was likely to resist and that Russ would have had to attack the Thousand Sons to get Magnus in chains. Why would Russ who didn't know about Magnus' importance of the Golden Throne, and having heard the Emperors explicit command that Magnus and his Legion would be wiped out if they used sorcery at Nikaea, think about a change to his orders directly from his Warmaster?

Magnus' space marines were already written off, the Emperor only wanted his psychic battery after it ruined the webway.

And Russ still did the bidding of a champion of Chaos over the desires of the Emperor to the detriment of the Imperium.

"But I didn't know" is not an excuse that carries any weight in 40k and the Emperor wasn't known for his sense of fair play or forgiving nature.

Had a mere mortal man fucked up so hard they would have been executed.

Yes it was an honest mistake. That doesn't matter.

>To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.

It's right there in the intro page to everything.

Well space marines are given more lee way. Also I'm pretty sure there have been times where Imperial guard forces have fought each other because one of them got bad orders from a heretic, and they later teamed up to purge the guy.

Within the context of Imperial morality, the Immortal God-Emperor is not "good", He is what DEFINES "good". "Good" is what He wills, and Evil is what tries to oppose His will.

For the rest of the galaxy though he's just one nasty motherfucker, but it's not like we care about your opinion, you xenophiliac asshole.

>a bad man by any modern sense of ethics or morality
Good thing he's not really a man and is not judged as a man, then.

This.

Counterpoint - Emperor was unaware of the deals Magnus had already performed under the tutelage of the Prosperian scholars he was raised by, as well as the massive deal he made with birdman to save his legion. Emps informing him of the nature of Chaos could have provoked one of two possible results - either Magnus would figure that he was in too deep already to pull out of the deal and just make more to supercharge his legion, believing that he could get him and his legion out when Tzeentch came to collect, or he would have immediately tried to pull out of the deal, thus sealing the fate of the TSons to the fleshchange and leaving the Imperium down a legion and a Primarch with nothing to do.
On Lorgar's side, wasn't the religion on Cholchis designed to directly worship the Chaos gods prior to his arrival? Considering he grew up in that religion, took his two most trusted advisors, Kor-Phaeron and Erebus, from that religion, and marshal over half his legion from that same world? If Emps told him of Chaos's existence, wouldn't that prompt the Cholchisian elements of the WB to go against the Emperor in service to their now-proven gods, thus prompting a rebellion and subsequent purge like the IInd and XIth, slowing down the crusade even more?

>Good thing he's not really a man and is not judged as a man, then.

He always denied that he was a god so he doesn't get the Zeus Pass.

If he wanted to be the leader of mankind then he should at bare minimum be judged as a man and as an exemplar to follow for trillions of followers be judged all the more stringently.

In which he comes up very short in every way that matters save raw power.

In every measurable way he is an insufferable tosser in gaudy armour remarkable only for being a powerful psyker.

Had he kept hold of the Zeus Card he could have been judged as a god and as such would have come to the conclusion that he's a tosser but less of a tosser compared to the alternatives.

In both those cases it would have brought the problems to a boil much sooner.

As it was the forces of Chaos had time to fester and worm and corrupt its way across a lot more ground and could strike at their convenience.

>If I tell my sons to stick their fingers in their ears and hum really loudly the sharks will ignore them

>He always denied that he was a god
And we don't judge him as a god. We judge him as a leader and an icon.

>If he wanted to be the leader of mankind then he should at bare minimum be judged as a man
No. The whole point of judging leaders is that they are judged based on how they acted in the moral context of their responsibility, which concerns lives of many, and thus largely transcends the morality of one man, who is only responsible for his own life. Harry S. Truman could be a very sympathetic dude or he could be an inhuman machine, but nevertheless we are going to judge him for the bombs and not for his character.

>No. The whole point of judging leaders is that they are judged based on how they acted in the moral context of their responsibility, which concerns lives of many, and thus largely transcends the morality of one man, who is only responsible for his own life.

Pity he was shit at that also.

Stop defending that abortion of a ham-fisted fluff.
Emps trying to abolish religion despite him being intimately familiar with millenias of how humans and religion interact and how humans and societies work and how to make them follow is of the dumbest things in the heresy.

Dunno. Imperium is still right there, 10000 years later. Counts as a job done alright in my book.
>inb4 "Imperium happened not thanks to but despite the efforts of the guy who created it in the first place"

and it was forced into the earliest segment witht he last church, honestly that should have been the first hint that the HH series would be dumb

I don't think so. Communists also were pretty well educated guys with a good understanding of what people want, and they also tried to abolish religion. Yeah, they also failed, but the point is - idealists with a vision very well may try changing the nature of humanity to fit their vision. They don't always succeed, but it never stops them from trying.

The Imperium survived by embracing religion, embracing the use of psykers in war and castrating the power of super human post humans that he had created and returning power to mortal men.

Final icing on the cake is that the state religion is based on scripture written by Logar before the Emperor drove him into the embrace of Chaos.

I'm not going to say that the Emperor played no important and vital part in setting up the most awful sustainable regime in human history, quite the reverse. I'm just going to suggest that someone like Malcador or Guilliman could have done it better.

the trouble there is the fact that human nature cannot be changed by force, you can change individuals, but rarely how you planned to, control is fickle, and more over Control is easily confused with peace and prosperity

in short the aspects that are actually helping man are not what the Emperor had put in place and contradict his edicts in word and spirit

He didn't want to be idolized, going as far as telling every single person awe struckes by him that he was just a man. I remember one story he was playing chess and came to the realization that he wasn't going to love through the heresy.

Can't blame him for Magnus's folly which led him being chained to the throne.

I'm not in the mood to argue human nature and how it can or can't be changed with you. The point is - people tried, people try and people will continue trying to do exactly that.

>The Imperium survived by embracing religion, embracing the use of psykers in war and castrating the power of super human post humans that he had created and returning power to mortal men.
Good thing that Imperium that He built could easily do it.
>Final icing on the cake is that the state religion is based on scripture written by Logar before the Emperor drove him into the embrace of Chaos.
Doesn't matter - got sick ideology.
>I'm just going to suggest that someone like Malcador or Guilliman could have done it better.
Why, thanks, Captain Hindsight! What would we do without you?

Then maybe he shouldn't have gone prancing around in golden armour, covered in religious looking iconography with a halo.

He could cast illusions. Maybe he should have looked like generic everyman with whom people could relate and get a sense of "one of us" rather than always looking like a 9 foot tall chiseled featured Adonis bathed in light.

Maybe he shouldn't have called his great undertaking a Great Crusade and designed his ships to look like cathedrals.

Maybe he shouldn't have intentionally created a Personality Cult that would cause a hapy little trouser accident in a member of the Kim dynasty.

>Can't blame him for Magnus's folly
No that is true. I can blame him for handling it and other things poorly.

Amalathians are right. It all went Just As Planned.

>Good thing that Imperium that He built could easily do it.
Which wasn't his intention

>Doesn't matter - got sick ideology.
That also proved he was completely and utterly wrong

>Why, thanks, Captain Hindsight! What would we do without you?
Make the same shitty mistakes over and over and over and over again down the millennia because people don't pay attention. Like embracing warlordism as a viable substitute for delegation, diplomacy and efficient administration.

>Which wasn't his intention
Nobody gives a flying fuck about His intentions, even the faithful, who recognize them as unfathomable. What we judge here are the results.

>That also proved he was completely and utterly wrong
Good thing that creating the Imperium is not a Jeopardy! episode.

>Make the same shitty mistakes over and over and over and over again down the millennia because people don't pay attention
Someone said above that you can't change human nature by force, which justifies people harvesting rake handles with their faces.
> Like embracing warlordism as a viable substitute for delegation, diplomacy and efficient administration.
But it IS a viable substitute for delegation, diplomacy and efficient administration. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.

And all because McNeill is a card-carrying fedora.
That's because commies were, as you said, young idealists, not jaded, millenia old shamans that have personally founded massive movements and religions. Literal Jesus-Mohamed-Buddha acting all "why are people attached to religion?" is beyond retarded.

>He could cast illusions. Maybe he should have looked like generic everyman with whom people could relate and get a sense of "one of us" rather than always looking like a 9 foot tall chiseled featured Adonis bathed in light.
I can imagine trying to make people not see such a description as a god was an attempt to make humans see nothing as a god

No.

He embodied both the good and the bad in mankind. His xenophobia and hubris were powerful motivators in his personality, ultimately eclipsing his more benign traits.

Pointing at something that looks like, sounds like, acts like and smells like a hippo and telling me its not a hippo is not going to make me think its not a hippo and want to give it a pat on the head.

I am rather attached to my arms and would like this to remain the case.

>And all because McNeill is a card-carrying fedora.
True. Faggot is so damn cringeworthy.

>That's because commies were, as you said, young idealists
Lenin, Trotsky, Kirov, Dzerzhinsky, Kamenev, Zinovyev and the rest of the Fun Party were anything but young by the time of revolution. Stalin was an Orthodox Christian cleric by education for maximum irony to the boot.

> jaded, millenia old shamans that have personally founded massive movements and religions
N O T C A N O N

> acting all "why are people attached to religion?" is beyond retarded
Not doing that, but rather putting an effort to make people less reliant on religion. Or making a ruse with the opposite intentions. We'll never know.

Don't bother dude.

You're arguing with someone who capitalizes the h in 'his' when referring to a fictional Conan/Dune riff made up by a bunch of anti-establishment Brits in the 70's. There is absolutely no way that this guy will ever bow to reason and admit that the Emperor was an incompetent prat who succeeded only in dooming mankind to the most miserable, brutal regime imaginable.