Did the Chaos Gods used to be more benign?

Title says it all, really. I've heard here and there that back in the ancient days of Warhammer fluff - I'm talking Realms of Chaos, Rogue Trader time - the Chaos Gods were less monodimensionally evil and given more of a "Chaotic Neutral, but succumbing to Chaotic Evil is sooo easy" flavor. Is this right, or am I just lost in my own head?

Other user here with a question.

I've heard it said that the Chaos Gods were created around mankind's medieval age. That seems odd considering there was plenty of sentient life in the galaxy before mankind, and terrible Carnage in the War in Heaven too.

Before sentient beings existed the Chaos Gods rarely antagonized anyone

I mean that I've heard that, in the old fluff, it was more canon-compliant to have a sympathetic or even anti-heroic Chaos Champion character?

Chaos gods don't really adhere to time.

From what I've read, the Chaos Gods used to be less mustache twirlingly evil and more in the 'orange and blue morality' thing, but then people started getting too into the grimderp and now we have the chaos gods as they are now.

>the Chaos Gods were less monodimensionally evil

No.

Slaanesh's entire thing is that it's a teen who really wants its mummy and daddy to love it and doesn't understand it was made during a drug fueled super cannibalistic orgy that both are now too embarrassed to talk about.

And now they have a new kid they love. Except that kid might also be Slaanesh except not?

Possibly. The chaos gods do have positive aspects (Khorne: honor, Tzeentch: hope, etc), and maybe the constant grimdark state of the galaxy for the past ~20,000 years has just made them ridiculously grimdark themselves.

The Chaos Gods didn't exist before sentient beings. They're formed from the hopes, dreams, and fears of sentient beings.

They retconned the yin-yang aspects of the chaos gods i think. which is a damn shame

Chaos gods have two sides: Khorne is blood but also honor. Slaanesh is excess but also perfection. Nurgle is rot but also love. Tzeentch is schemes but also progress.

Their power and interpretation wax and wane with the galaxy and how its peoples act. In the grim darkness of the far future, that means the nasty side is more present.

No that's just nostalgia goggles. Here blatant tly evil horrors in the realm of chaos books. These days the gods aren't as violent/sadistic/perverted as GW aims for kids now

That's very old lore. They're said to be timeless now. Which is for the better desu

That's fan canon at never existed. Chaos was always pure evil

>Chaos was always pure evil
How orderly of it.

There used to be gods of Order.

They got rid of those.

hurm.

The thing to remember about chaos lore is that it went through basically 3 stages.

Era 1 of Chaos lore was very ill defined and weirdly humanocentric, so only things that happened on Earth matters and the rest of the galaxy might as well be unpopulated except that one time the Eldar, who have stronger souls than humans and thus should have been cranking out chaos gods left and right, made Slaneesh on accident.

Era 2 of chaos lore was the one that established them as basically giant psychic parasites and tried to give them actual rules to how they worked on a metaphysical level.

Era 3, the current era, is the really wanky CHAOS IS FOREVER CHAOS IS INFINITE POWER EVERY TIME A PIG FARTS CHAOS CONSUMES ANOTHER MULTIVERSE (but also one half dead guy made of 20 weakass Psykers can solo all 4 chaos gods at once) CHAOS IS SUPER IMPORTANT AND SERIOUS YOU GUYS PLS TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY.

Because of how 40k works, there is no such thing as non-canon so you get weird holdovers from all of the different interpretations on how Chaos and the warp are supposed to work. So chaos lore is just sort of a mess, even by 40k standards.

Didn't Khorne try to eat Khaine because it's implied any time a god loses too many followers the Chaos God most related to them claims them?

Like if you look at the current Eldar gods still around, it seems that they're all counterparts of the Chaos Gods.

Well
Khaine seems to be very similar to Khorne
Cegoratch is a more jovial/elf friendly Tzeentch
Isha and Nurgle. . .TECHNICALLY Nurgle is supposed to represent the birth and creation of new life, but its quite clear they are directly opposed (but it would explain why he stole her for himself).

That just leaves Slaanesh. Slaanesh seems to stand alone with no eldar counterpart

Slaanesh is the eldar counterpart, dingus

>CHAOS IS SUPER IMPORTANT AND SERIOUS YOU GUYS PLS TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY.
And yet at the same time, everyone except humans are immune to them.

So wait, if everybody just settled their collective ass down a bit, the Chaos Gods would too?

If everybody just settled their collective ass down a bit a lot of the problems in 40k could probably be solved.

It's the new god of the dead that's Slaanesh's counterpart. Born in a similar way and even described as "a god to defeat a goddess" by Yvraine.

>Isha and Nurgle. . .TECHNICALLY Nurgle is supposed to represent the birth and creation of new life, but its quite clear they are directly opposed (but it would explain why he stole her for himself).
Eldar gods seems to be generally more stable and cleanly-defined than Chaos gods. They're made up of clearer and more developed ideas, while Chaos is an unstable miasma of emotions. It just so happens that what Isha and Nurgle represent has the greatest gap between its "sane" and "crazy" versions.

>That timeline where all the races collectively agreed to resolve their differences via extremely violent sports instead of war
Literally everyone is happy because of it.

Humans are spiritually reckless and prone to sorcery. Eldar, who have infinitely more potent souls, could (as a collective civilization spanning a multitude of systems) murderfuck each other to death in the streets by untold trillions for millenia while holding Slaanesh back spiritually. It's the same reason Eldar can generally use psychic powers fine, but humans are prone to accidentally opening up portals for Chaos to spill out of. Humans don't know what the fuck they're doing when it comes to psychic powers.

This is completely true, which some GMs use to great effect in Black Crusade.
Khorne used to be a lot more focused on Honor and the romanticization of war that really came with the territory of medieval aesthetics.
What people now know as Malal used to be much more folded into Slaanesh as being the rebellious teenage Chaos God spitting in the face of Chaos itself sometimes.
People tend to forget that one of Tzeentch's big aspects is Hope, so things like freaky literal interpretations of biblical angels would actually be perfect for Tzeentchian daemons right alongside gribbly tentacle burdmen.
Nurgle has actually been much more intensely flanderized by Veeky Forums and the fandom at large than the other gods, because most fa/tg/uys are usually Nurgle cultists, and people tend to forget that he is the god of Entropy and Despair. I still always like the idea of Nurgle greater daemons appearing as Wodan-esque ancient sorcerers who act as harbringers of winter, with frost giants instead of plaguebearers.

Anyone else think that Chaos would really have done better if Games Workshop had let it have actual gray, instead of being the uttermost pitchblack faction?

Huh. Can you point to any particular sources for this?

He's made of a couple hundred not really weakass psykers. Not 20.

>god of Entropy and Despair
Would be nice to show this on the miniatures, with angry, sad and downtrodden mortal followers and happy daemons. Nurgle himself enjoys the suffering of mortals, and so do his daemons, but the mortals themselves probably not so much.

>at one point, it was over 9000 of them.

Kind of. Chaos has a weird relationship to time, but whatever.
By default, none of the Chaos Gods, barring maybe Malal, are really "Evil". Khorne and Slaanesh have pretty even counterparts in the Greek pantheon as Aries and Dionysus (The Roman Bacchus is a closer fit, but whatever), while Nurgle is just the natural, Lion King Circle of Life, and Tzeentch is, well, complicated.
All of them are gonna kill people, Khorne and Nurgle more than the other two, basically being
half of the four Horsemen and whatnot, and Khorne in particular fails PR forever, but they really only function as natural extensions of the way the world works.

Now, the timeline around Slaanesh is a bit wonky, considering it didn't exist until the Eldar fucked it into existence, which then made it retroactively always there, Chaos being Chaos, but Fantasy Slaanesh varies from 40K Slaanesh in how much it stands in the other god's corn flakes. Because Slaanesh gets a bit of credit every time a follower does good in the eyes of their main God, this spawned something of an arms race, especially between Khorne and Nurgle, and Slaanesh. Slaanesh is really the only god that benefits from people not being dead, while Khorne and Nurgle could benefit from longer relationships, but loose out more because the gap between them and Slaanesh shrinks more than they gain, so they have every incentive to kill as many people as possible.
Tzeentch, again, is complicated.

Exacerbating this, the mortal races of 40K are in no hurry to stop shooting eachother in the face. Between Khorne and Nurgle wanting to cash out as early, and brutally as possible, Slaanesh wanting to draw things out and enjoy them, Tzeentch fucking with everybody, and the mortal races out to stab eachother, it's perfect for the Chaos Gods to step up and be more "evil" and less subtle.

So, 40K is more "evil" on two counts. One, there's more opportunity for them to do ill, because of their surroundings, and two, Slaanesh is a pickpocket.

The chaos god's "good side" is more about how their follower's perceive them.

Khorne is rage and destruction but to a human tribe in the north he's the patron that makes you stronger and you'll follow him because that's what you're raised to do.