Are the Dark Angels cool?

no, the only cool space marines are the salamanders

Before the heresy when they got shit done without all of that angst they were cool as shit. Dark age of technology weapons, better color scheme.

Fallen are cooler. Fallen have pulled the ultimate trick on the Dark Angels.

Yes..? It's hard to say, mostly because GW has rewritten the Dark Angels into so many different corners, even they don't know who they are anymore. To me, they were always the more Arthurian knights to the Fists' Germanic knights, and as such, used the 'oh so mysterious" nonsense to their advantage. However, that's just my headcanon, they were originally more Native American than anything.

>they were originally more Native American than anything
Explain

...

cloudrunner senpai sama

Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous that it was never brought up again.

huh, the more you know

Plainsworld is only one recruitment world for the Dark Angels.

Cimmeria is another.

Their secret isn't even remotely fucking interesting and would not be deemed heretical like they think. I don't know why they are so obsessed with secrecy when all that happened was disgruntled guys in their legion made civil war with them.

Like big deal, this is nothing compared to shit that usually happens in 40k. Going crazy and hunting the fallen over it is beyond pointless at this point.

I guess the whole secret plot was a big deal back 10-15 years ago, but now its very insignificant.

I'm fact, they're fairly hot

im new to 40k so sorry for asking this quesiton if its obvious
but why are the dark angles traitors, despite being a loyalist legion/chapter and why havent they been condemned by the inquisition or something?

During the Horus Heresy, half of the legion went rogue. The loyalist half and the traitor half fought so hard their planet blew up. The largest shard is now the loyalist base and they try to find the remaining traitors around the galaxy.
The twist is that only the chapter and their successors know this and they desperately try to keep it secret from everyone else.

>but why are the dark angles traitors
They are not, or at least, implied not to be.
>despite being a loyalist legion/chapter
There was a civil war in their chapter, led by a dude who was later proven to have been possessed by Chaos.
>why haven't they been condemned by the inquisition or something?
They were, but unlike the other legions who adopted the codes, the Dark Angels pretty much remained a full-fledged legion in all but name, and are very well known for assassinating Inquisitors who stick their noses where it doesn't belong.

Dark Angels have a cool color scheme and heraldry. I like how the standard marines, deathwing, and ravenwing all have different, but complementary schemes. My Dark Angel army is my only force that isn't My Guys.

Also their edgy imagine combined with their inside joke is amusing.

Yeah, but Blood Ravens are cooler.

>40k
nope.

There is nothing cool about wearing clothes over power armor.

It just sounds too edgy "my bros are called the spooky dark angels" okay fag.

1/2
The Dark Angels trace their warrior traditions back to the knightly Order of Caliban. Caliban was a forested deathworld where Great Beasts - each one a unique death-dealing kill-machine - roamed around killing anything that moved seemingly just because they liked to. (They were almost certainly daemons, though nobody knew that at the time). The orders were established to go out and hunt them. They rode black Ravenwing horses and used pistols and crappy chainswords, so the fact that they were often successful is pretty impressive.
One knightly order, simply called the Order, began to allow non-nobles in to their brotherhood - they based their honor on merit rather than bloodline. This made them popular with the common folk but decidedly unpopular with the other orders. Most importantly, when the awesomest kngiht of the Order, Luther, found Lion el'Jonson found living alone in the forests, the Primarch joined the Order (after learning how to speak in a matter of days).
He quickly rose to the top of the hierarchy, known as the Inner Circle, and immediately knew what they had to do - exterminate ALL the Great Beasts to make Caliban a safe(r) world where people could have farms and stuff.
See, the reason the Order not only killed every single Great Beast in a handful of years, but also defeated several knightly orders who thought wiping out the Great Beasts amounted to heresy, was because they had honor. They knew what they were doing was righteous in a cosmic sense, and that they could depend on their brothers no matter what.

>Are the Dark Angels cool?
That depends on what you are cool with since their lore is riddled with homosexual references and their Primarch is a gay poet.

2/3
See, the Order based all of its fighting methods on the spiral - the guy to your left protects you while you protect the guy to your right. It was a very effective way to defend against and hunt the Great Beasts. So the "Inner Circle" was literally the guys in charge, who occupied the center of the spiral so they could see the whole battle and ensure everyone could hear their commands.

Then the Emperor came to Caliban. He had just finished the Unification Wars on Terra with his Thunder Warriors (proto-Astartes) and was now beginning his Great Crusade to reunite Mankind into a new Imperium. Caliban was his first stop.
Lion and his friends in the Order chose progress and change over tradition and mysticism once again, and eagerly agree to become the first new additions to the First Legion, which the Lion calls the Dark Angels, and bring Caliban into the new Imperium.

Flash forward a few centuries, and Luther has become bitter. He was too old to become and Astartes, so he was left on Caliban to train new recruits while the Lion, his dearest friend, continued to storm the heavens and conquer the galaxy in the name of Mankind. To make matters worse, it was obvious to everyone that, had he not found the Lion and brought him into the Order, Luther would have easily been the most capable and charismatic knight of the age. But he befriended a fricking Primarch, so he was stuck being second best to a literal demigod who easily outperformed him in every goddamn thing. And Luther was left to see the culture of his homeworld degrade and devolve into the bulky, boxy, homogenous "culture" of the Imperium. All the traditions he once held dear have been crushed under the treads of Chimeras and prefab habitation cubes. Suddenly, progress and change doesn't seem so honorable. Consumed by regret and jealousy (and the self-loathing that came with a jealousy he wished he didn't have), Luther fell to Chaos.

3/4
See, there were Great Beasts on Caliban in the first place because there was a nasty Warp rift in the core of the planet. Even though the Order wiped them out, new ones spontaneously appeared. The Lion not only ruined the culture and traditions of Caliban in the name of a greater goal, but that greater goal wasn't even really achieved. They crushed the other knightly orders and irrevocably changed life on Caliban... for nothing. And now the Lion left the disorder he sewed behind so he could chase personal glory on a scale greater than any man could dream.
So the Ruinious Powers got to Luther who, not knowing anything about the Warp, believed he had been chosen by the mystical forces he once scoffed at (mostly at the Lion's insistence that religion was merely superstition) to return the 4,000-year old traditions to Caliban and return it to the way it was before the Lion and the Imperium messed it all up. To be fair, the daemons were performing literal miracles and telling Luther exactly what he wanted to hear, so it kind of makes sense for him to turn against the Lion and the Imperium.
Well, when the Lion returns home, he is greeted by orbital fire. He quickly realizes what is going on, because he is a genius gary-stu like all the Primarchs, and manages to land on the planet to face Luther and try to convince him to turn away from this madness, that the Imperium really IS better for Caliban and ISN'T heresy, as Luther now claims.
They fight, the Lion wins, but hesitates to kill his first and dearest friend. Luther takes advantage of this and strikes the Lion down. He realizes what he's done and, now filled with an even MORE profound regret about how all this shook down, loses his mind.
The planet is destroyed in the ensuing fighting, the Fallen are scattered, and the Lion is taken into a "mystical" realm (probably a secret chamber in the Rock, which is actually the chunk of Caliban containing the Order's original mountain monastery).

This means little in the 40k universe.
Jaghatai Khan hasn't much to do with Chagatai.

4/4 (Last one, seriously)

The Dark Angels, now without a Primarch and facing the greatest stain on their honor imaginable, flip the fuck out. Remember, the Order was founded on the idea that their greatest strength is honor and the righteousness of their cause. Now, half of them rebelled against that cause and they lost their demigod leader who led them to that cause in the first place. This is why they are so obsessed with hunting the Fallen and keeping their existence a secret. It isn't so much a concern that they will get excommunicated (though that definitely matters). They are focused on regaining their honor so they can return to being the best, most awesomest of the Emperor's Legions (ahem, I mean "Chapter and successor Chapters"). Without their honor, they are just space marines. But the Inner Circle believes they can restore their lost honor and with it, their source of strength.

The great irony, of course, is that Luther was the one who ended up valuing strength from tradition more than strength from progress, but now the Dark Angels are obsessed with restoring the Order's pride and their good name - the very things Luther rebelled against the Lion to defend. The Lion saw very little value in maintaining a culture of tradition for the sake of anchoring one's actions in the wisdom of those who came before, but the Dark Angels' Inner Circle has become the epitome of exactly that. They do decidedly dishonorable things (for example, turning on Guardsmen who unwittingly discover the existence of the Fallen, abandoning allies on the battlefield to go capture one Fallen nearby, etc) in the name of
"honor" - precisely the same hypocrisy of the old knightly orders that once infuriated the Lion.

99% of the Dark Angels have no idea that any of this happened - they only learn a little bit more each time they get promoted. The spiral has lost all meaning. The Lion is going to be pissed when he wakes up.

I fucking love the Dark Angels. They capture the tone and themes of Warhammer 40k perfectly. If the importance of the Chapter's honor and tradition isn't hammered into them for decades, how many would remain loyal after hearing the story of the Fallen... and what the Chapter's done to find them? The monks' habits they wear over their armor, the bone-white Deathwing livery, the Ravenwing fighting style, the decorative honor feathers, the black pearls an Interrogator-Chaplain puts on his Crozius for every Fallen he gets to repent... they are exactly the kind of "pointless tradition" the Order once crusaded against on Caliban. Now, as the Dark Angels, it's all they have. Without it, they would probably fall apart.

>The Lion is going to be pissed when he wakes up.
He surely will.
I wonder if he'll "clean" his legion...

Everyone gets a power backhand.
No exceptions.

Just a reminder that this joke Chapter was created as a massive gay joke:
1) Lionel Johnson was a repressed homosexual poet from the 19 century.
2) "The Dark Angel" was a poem about unrequited lusts.
3) The Rock was a gay bar near GW's HQ.

To be fair everything GW ever created was a joke to some degree

This.
Pretty much all legions are pathetic in some degrees.

No shit, its hilarious.

I really don't understand why guys like you keep repeating this lie: it was not half the legion, it was just the company from their fortress monastery and a small bunch of recruits, that's it. And there hasn,t been any much fightung at all, they just bombed the monastery so fiercely that the planet broke up.