Were the Fallen right?

it varies person to person, personally i like the whole "paranoid/mysterious space knights" thing but the DW and RW and their heavier use of plasma is a neat little gimmick

Robes, feathers, plasma tech, ravenwing, deathwing, biblical naming conventions, two sides of a coin chaos/loyalist conflict. I love me some space queers

Plasma.

DA fag here, why is "LMAO all dank angles are traitor " apparently the funniest shit ever to some people i don't get its popularity as a joke

Top aesthetics. I've always liked robes over armor, and the wings break up their color scheme so they don't look like a giant, ugly blob like most chapters.

I like that they have their own goals beyond typical marine fare, and memes aside the "paranoid repentant knights" schtick is nice.

Watchers are cute.

Gav Thorpe who seemingly wields most of their novels says no. And he also says the DA are loyal. None of these are as fun as the speculation however. The question you should be asking, however, is 'Is Cypher loyal?'

I suspect that the more boring answer of 'yes, he is, but he is on a super secret mission to do ultimate good but using some immoral means.'

Personally I think it would have been more fun if both sides of the dark angels were grey areas and cypher was out purely for the legion.

I like they're sheer determination, and the fact that fallen aside you can play them a number of ways. I fucking love Terminators too which help, but I like the idea of my boys when the Fallen aren't there basically being Grail Knight dating back to Caliban on a holy quest to find such and such. They just have a hard on for killing traitors.

because as a chaos player seeing the danglefags freak the fuck out gives me great pleasure at the game store.

>Green is my favorite color
>Monks
>Plasma
>Paranoid
>Tacticool
>Secretive

my first ever 40k media was the Plainsworld Deathwing story and I bought 3rd Edition Dark Angels the next day with my allowance. Its been a long 14 years of DA faggotry after.

Dark Angels have some really cool models, DJ booth flyer aside. I kind of wish I did them instead of Iron Hands.

That's the thing about history, it doesn't matter who was right, just who won

Me too. I dropped DA when they retconned it.

Quick rundown ?

Essentially, Lion was 100% loyal, and so were all the normal Dangles. However, the Fallen weren't all Chaos-corrupted, nor were they all noble-minded. Some joined Luther because they looked at the facts and went "fuck, the Lion's a traitor!" Some joined him because they were traitors.

...

Its really funny how the DAngels are more anal about their traitors than any other chapter and thinks other factions care that much.

Grey Knights, the Inquisition, and the Emperor don't care that much and the rest of the space marines have had their fair share of renegades too.

Ironically the shit that is more dangerous is their pseudo legion building (although fucking Guilliman is a hypocrit on this by literally building hundreds of thousands of secret super space marines on mars).

The Inquisition would care if they knew, but after Inquisitors mysteriously disappear when enquiring into the DA, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to find out much.

Sons of Malice

It's a case of legacy lore being invalidated by newer retcons, but still being canon due to BL incompetence.
Originally the DA were the only chapter to have a big divide between them, caught in the middle of the civil war, and when they finally got their shit sorted, it's understandable they would want to delet all traces of their honour being marred.
But by now, with the HH series, we have renegades from every chapter breaking off, loyalist traitors and traitor loyalists, gullyman making imperium secundus, the precursors to the grey knights being traitor marine suicide squad, and the basis of the dark angels' lore now makes no sense, but they can't retcon it any more than they can just retcon sanguinius' death. Sure, they've been fucking around with it, trying to make their divide bigger than most, but overall it only adds to the big long list of reasons why HH should be ignored as canon.

This.
It's up for further change but of the current info concerning the DA we have:

Lion's fleet and Corswain's detached forces
>Actively loyal
>Lion's fleet off to exterminatus Traitor worlds
>Corswain's fleet hunting Typhus
>Made up mostly of Calibanite veterans

Luther's DA
>Make Caliban Great Again is their primary goal
>Want to secede from the Imperium
>Not actively fighting Loyalists, not actively fighting Traitors
>Technically traitors but not by throwing in directly with Horus or Chaos intentionally
>The idea of allying with Horus if he'll give Caliban independence has been mooted
>Made up mostly of inexperienced Calibanites

Astelan's DA
>Nostalgiafags who want to serve the Imperium without all this gay Calibanite shit
>Pretending to be loyal to Luther
>Actually want to depose him
>Also don't want the Lion as their commander
>Technically traitor as they want rid of the Lion, but would claim otherwise as they want to go back to being the First Legion under the old Emperor / Terran command structure
>Made up mostly of Terran veterans

'Unaligned' DA
>Secret units of DA sent out from Caliban
>The Lion doesn't know they exist
>Nominally loyal to Luther but have been on comms blackout so have no idea what's going on
>Technically Loyalist as the one group we've seen so far threw in with the Space Wolves over the Alpha Legion
>Made up of inexperienced Calibanites

Zahariel's coven
>Deluded apparent Chaos worshippers
>Make Caliban Chaos Again
>It's like twelve guys

What gets especially complicated is that Luther, Astelan and Zahariel are all pretending to be allies but have different end goals, the only thing they all publicly agree on is that the Lion has to go.

Why the Lion never noticed that Luther was cooking the books with the amount of reinforcements he was sending out is a bit of a flaw for a strategic mastermind.
Also every faction likely has some Terrans and some Calibanites.

Shorter:

>Lion
Loyal to the Emperor, hates the Traitors, fancies himself in a high rank position after it's all over
>Luther
Wants Caliban to be an independent, civilised 'Imperial-tech' planet but without the Imperium exploiting the shit out of the place. Traitor to the Imperium but not EVIL.
>Astelan
Wants rid of the Lion and for Legio I to go back to pre-Caliban status. Traitor to the Lion but would say he is loyal to the Emperor.
>Zahariel
Wants Caliban to go back to pre-Imperial conditions, traitor to everyone I suppose.
>Everyone else
Has no fucking clue.

So 'the Fallen' are currently made up of 3 or 4 factions with different reasons for being considered Traitor due to their relationship to the Lion and Luther.

>>Nostalgiafags who want to serve the Imperium without all this gay Calibanite shit
>tfw our genefather is autismo absoluto
>turns medieval adults into pseudo marines instead of kidnapping children to turn into proper supersoldiers
>Luther this, Luther that, Luther everything
>bet these calibanites don't even know how a bolter works
>my feet hurt
>I want to go back to the Emperor

>Astelan
pic related

It's typical moral grey bullshit. Lion sperged and kicked not only his loyalty wavered man luthor, but every single marine. Ignorant or knowing, loyal or not back to the homeworld and then expected them to rot there, pump out marines and for it to never come back and bite him.
Luthor fucked up, he had a petty moment and while that deserved punishment Lion did nothing but give the man the tools to fester and corrupt both himself and everyone around him. On the other hand, Luthor wanted to keep his world alive rather then allow it to be nuked should big E realise how tainted it was

Neat. I really can trace similarities with political parties or civil war faction from everywhere everytime.

I would like GW to make more complex plots instead of the "good" guys vs evil chaos and xenos. (Ok, we have the Inquisition but it is really secretive and I would like the multipolar approach in the Imperium political affairs)

Top aesthetics, I love the "monastic order of knights" thing. As well as the secrecy, special units, and going fast. Could give a fuck about named characters, but I play a successor chapter.

You mean sent his most trusted Lieutenant and grizzled veterans to look after the thing most precious to him

No, they all laughed at Lion when he bought LifeAlert for his entire legion. Guess who's laughing now?

You motherfucker

I think it's worth noting also the Chaos worshippers from Caliban are usual run of the mill chaos. The weird warp-based device in Caliban kinda messed the entire planet up(Hence why it had so many Chaos beasts), it wasnt really alligned with the 4 gods. It's implied in some fluff, it was around before them.

I had to look that up, jesus christ that's cold

Are NOT usual run of the mill chaos*

Sorry.

I don't get it.

...

Plasma, robes, knightly order theme

KEK

>No, they all laughed at Lion when he bought LifeAlert for his entire legion. Guess who's laughing now?

That was pretty good user, I had a sensible but audible chuckle

...

For me, it's partly because it's an easy way to trigger Dark Angels fans. The other part is that the Fallen being the actual loyalists, whereas the current Dark Angels are the traitors, make them more interesting to me, and better justifies their murderous obsession with keeping a secret that no one actually cares about.

>was x 40K faction right
No.

Also, I'm not really one to rant about the Horus Heresy novels, but I hate that it very firmly removed Lion's ambiguous loyalty. It not only made him loyal, but SUPER DUPER loyal, even though the original implications of him arriving at the Siege of Terra so late made him interesting to me.

Now he's just as blindly loyal as Russ, with no real complexity.

I think they just moved the complexity. He's moral but good legion isn't and he's a paranoid man who has had his paranoia validated. There's no one he can trust and he's so bad with people there's no easy answer.

I don't Fallen your tricks!

If you're talking about the Gav Thorpe book where they interrogate Astelan, Gav came out and said that his view of events as they happened are skewed somewhat and his reasoning is kind of dumb. Like the author said, it was supposed to be a character study of the Fallen and not an accurate view of what happened.

Not saying I like the black and white approach, but I also don't think BL and GW have ever tried to push the "Dark Angels are traitors" meme seriously.

Cypher does tell... someone, can't remember who, but he does say not all of the Fallen turned to Chaos and quite a few of them went back to being whatever passes for loyal.

When I started playing them when I was 13? Green was my favorite color and the robe thing they had going was neat.

I still like the Green and the Robes, but the paranoia, the Deathwing, the heavy use of plasma, the Unforgiven as a concept, and the whole idea behind the Great Hunt. Really, if they had just owned up to what happened and took part in the Great Scouring things would probably have been fine, but because they were who they were they freaked out and now they're in some real deep shit if anyone ever finds out, which is their real crime and makes them super interesting for me. Having them try and do the right thing as often as they can but being forced to do awful things to keep a secret
that wouldn't have been a problem in the first place is lore I can get behind.

I think the Lion being loyal to the Emperor and the Imperium as a concept as much as he was while distrusting everyone else around him actually makes him a pretty neat character.

Yeah, I would have enjoyed more situations where a legion/Primarch is torn about which side to join. With the exception of Jaghatai everyone immediately falls into one camp or the other. The idea of the Dark Angels quietly waiting things out and then swooping in to be the big heroes after the battle is already decided is way more interesting to me than “Loyalty is its own reward.”

The Dark Angels don’t even have a reason to be so autistic about the Fallen anymore since the new Heresy fluff explicitly states that every loyalist legion had traitorous factions.

It isn't just the Fallen that are the problem anymore, it's the millennia long cover-up and everything they've done to perpetuate the cover-up that'll do them in if anyone finds out.

Personally I think that's more interesting, even if for the fact that the Dark Angels may have become twisted in their own loyalty.

I still love that story, I love even the barest hints that it is still canon.

How can DAngles be both space Arthurian knights AND Space Injuns smoking peace pipes!? Who is writing this shit?

>the scouring
While true, the other legions as far as we know dealt with their rebel problems whereas for the DA their traitorous brethren are still around and just keep popping up. There's also the problem that the DA just hold themselves up to a higher standard than every one else. Of course there were rebel Space wolves they're basically just animals, obviously Ultramarines fell their high ideals make them easy prey for corruption etc etc but a full third of our own?

eh they recruit from loads of different worlds

Plus any remaining heretic Ultramarines, Wolves, Ravenguard etc no longer wear their legion colors or identify with their old legion in anyway at this point. They are twisted weirdos living in the Eye.

The DA secrecy needs to go up a notch. Something truly shitty, like they sabotaged the Emperor and doomed him in his fight VS Horus. Something where they can be construed as responsible for the ultimate loss.

>How can DAngles be both space Arthurian knights AND Space Injuns smoking peace pipes!?

They kind of can't be anymore. The Space Marine Hero's book for Azrael goes over in some detail his recruitment and during the process they give him a new name from a dead former Dark Angel, Azrael. Add in that it's sort of implied the indoctrination Azrael went through mostly stripped him of his memories and he can only get them back piecemeal and it's kind of hard to find a reason for it, which blows because that Native American lore was some seriously cool shit and really set them apart and gave them a cool flavor.

t. DA player

Quick question. Do the Fallen even have a consistent ideology? I thought they were like the Alpha Legion, each with their own goals and objectives.

Like, they were Luther's army, but after Luther got fucked up, everyone just scattered without purpose. So you have the 'noble evil' kind, the kind who are like "Luther's goal was a worthy one, we were the kin who were left behind on Caliban", the Cypher-led guys who fundamentally want redemption, and the dudes who are "Fuck that shit, it's every man for himself."

The Fallen are the battle brothers who are determined to bring the truth of the DA to the Imperium- that the DA geneseed is corrupted in the same ways as Legion II and XI. The DA obviously try to supress this info.

Nope, Legion II was wiped out do to Legion I's treachery, and Legion XI had to go too because they knew. The Fallen know this stuff but can't live with it.

Ok, now this I could actually kind of buy. The lore is pretty heavy handed with the whole "Paranoia and distrust are part of their geneseed" thing, and it wouldn't be hard to play this up and say that a small faction of those left on Caliban knew and manipulated Luther, Astelan, etc. to go rogue to cover their own escape so they could make it back to Terra or whatever, but Luther and Co. took it too far and they all got spread through time.

Work these three posts up into a coherent piece and there we have it. A final speculation on what really is going on with the Imperium's darkest secrets.

Aesthetics. Robes, coats, and a whole lot of bling. I also enjoy the flexible lore, their edgy brooding nature, and the rogue cypher who people can't decide is good or evil. I don't care as much for cypher's new model though - while it looks great, the pose is very much like he is posing for a photo instead of the active pose he had before.

where did the "dark angels are all gay the gay bar near GW HQ in the 1980s was called The Rock!!!1" meme come from?

If you feel like taking something Cawl Inferior says super literally

>"The warriors were not at fault. The science is not at fault. Their Primarchs were. Chapters from your gene-line have also fallen in the past millennia, lord regent, and we do not censor them."

That might imply the Lion is the only Primarch who possibly passed along a "broken" line and was still loyal to the Emperor. It'd be a pretty neat direction to take them in, born wrong but still loyal to an Imperium who would want them dead anyway.

Gathering storm has them pretty much all having their own goals.Some are loyalists who were mislead, some have fully fully embraced the ruinous powers, some want forgiveness others not so much. Many just want to be left alone and some bitter cunts are determined to make life difficult for the DA. It doesn't say if there any major factions among them but I guess Cypher must have found some way of getting a bunch of them to help out Bobby G. Bear in mind there's still at least a company's worth of them imprisoned on Terra

the gay bit is because because Dark Angel is a poem by Lionel Johnson who was one of Oscar Wilde's bum chums with usual interpretation of the poem being that it describes his struggle remaining a devout Catholic whilst also lusting for Oscar's man gravy. The Rock bit is of a odd one, while there's a bunch of places in Nottingham with "The Rock" in the name by virtue of it being built around a castle that sits on a rock literally called Castle Rock I don't know if any of them were specifically renowned for being gay meeting places, but given that a lot often lore was written during Thatchers reign which to be blunt wasn't a great time to be gay it could be that people didn't really want to advertise themselves a gay bars etc

better

“The Rock” being the name of a gay bar is just an internet meme offshoot of “Dark Angels are gay”

The Lion and the DA were actually named after a gay poet and his gay poem respectively but The Rock part just isn’t true

No

Could work if it was accidental and tied to their paranoia, but having them be antagonists just doesn't work.

nice! saved

Sounds like stupid BL schlock, ADB.

I didn't say it was a good idea, just that it could work.