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mastergelgoog · 5 years

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freestyle rewriting the heresy yet again

because stuff occurred to me last night after that post about the traitor primarchs

if you wanna do the greek tragedy right every traitor primarch should have a primary flaw and a lesson that they fail to learn which overcomes them in the end

Fulgrim is obsession, or ‘perfection is the enemy of the good.’ Fulgrim has been good at everything his whole life. he turned Chemos from a dying shitpit into a vibrant and peaceful world, and when called up to become a warrior and commander he became a damn good one. He even built up his legion from almost nothing after disaster nearly wiped them out. But now he’s actually competing with people on his level and it gets to him. He trains himself almost religiously, struggling to cut away the imperfections. He expects his legion to always improve; uniformly, to Fulgrim there’s nothing more disgraceful than failing to better yourself, no matter the circumstances, no matter how unreasonable it may be. It’s what leads him to letting Fabius tinker recklessly with the legion geneseed. To steal a line from the stewniverse “if I’m not perfect then who am I?”

His friendship with Ferrus is something that should be cast as the anchor on Fulgrim’s flights of fancy. Ferrus is prosaic and hardworking and responsible, gruff and bluff and earthy; he acts as a balance to Fulgrim’s mounting fanatical belief that he must be the best at everything at all times. Ferrus’ death can thus be cast as the loss of reason amidst the insanity of the heresy, and it’s what snaps Fulgrim’s last ties to sanity leaving him to plunge himself and his legion wholesale into the service of Slaanesh.

Perturabo is cold logic, or ‘humans aren’t rational.’ Perturabo believes that the ideal being is a Renaissance Man, the great thinker, expert in all fields, unburdened by such petty things as ‘emotion’ or ‘bonds’ or ‘human interest’. Perturabo believes mankind is best served by shutting up, sitting down, and working. Human error is a failstate and not to be countenanced. But people don’t function like that, fundamentally can’t function as if they’re datasheets on a page, and Perturabo gets irked when they don’t. Because even Perturabo doesn’t function like that, not really - he’s like one of those rationalists who claim they can operate perfectly logically, then throw a screaming tantrum when faced with a conclusion they don’t like.

Perturabo alienates everyone around him - his brethren, his legion, even his homeworld. To his eyes, they all fail him by not meeting his standards; they’re all too human, too soft. Perturabo’s insistence that he is incapable of failure is what tragically leaves him wide open to manipulation by Horus, who drives him and the Iron Warriors further and further into their self-dug bitterness and isolationism until Olympia itself revolts and the last nail is pounded into the coffin.

Konrad Curze is vengeance, or ‘fear exists to be conquered.’ Curze took control of Nostromo through savage terrorism, cowing the populace and the gangs and the murderers who preyed on people through shocking acts of murder and barbarism. He’s so good at it, though, that he never acknowledges the critical flaw - when he leaves Nostromo, he takes away the object of people’s fear, and he never setup a system to govern them without the threat of retaliation. The Night Lords become staffed with psychopaths and murderers, their unity as a legion slowly fraying. Curze himself sees torturous visions and nightmares, but it’s all without context, and he doesn’t particularly like wearing the device the Emperor made for him to curb the worst of it because he feels like it makes thinking difficult, so he just does without, becoming more erratic and unpredictable. In the end he lets himself be done in, with the line ‘death is nothing compared to vindication’ which can arguably taken as a recognition that he had become the kind of monster he once hunted.

Angron is, of course, rage or, to quote tumblr, ‘the hate you feel will warm your heart but leave you cold in the grave’. Of all the primarchs he’s the one with whom you can most do the cycle of violence thematic. He’s taken as a slave as a gladiator, leads a revolt, he’s ‘rescued’ by the Emperor on the brink of a crushing defeat, and becomes a rampaging one-man slaughterhouse loosed upon the galaxy. Angron’s response to his mistreatment is two-pronged: a total rejection of any authority deemed untrustworthy, fueled by his upbringing and the Emperor’s high-handedness, and a colossal hate-on for anything and everything. Angron wallows in his hate, because for him hate and violence are easy. The result is that he’s something of a foil for Perturabo - Angron doesn’t think, because he doesn’t like to think. The World Eaters become a riot of bloodthirsty killers, the librarians and chaplaincy first sidelined and then, at least in the case of the former, eliminated, because they’re not savage enough.

If the plot device of the battle cybernetics (’Butcher’s Nails’ in the BL series) is kept, it’s primary use is as a plot device to show the cycle of abuse - Angron has it forced on him as a child, he forces it upon his legion in turn. I’ve never been a great fan of the Nails as a plot device (especially in the BL series; it makes things too easy) because it’s not like they’re necessary to push someone into a Khornate rage, but they can work as a tipping point to help push the legion over the edge, especially back by Horus’ manipulations.

Mortarion is resentment, specifically, ‘bitterness is a poison.’ Like how Angron wallows in rage and Curze wallows in the fear he causes, Mortarion wallows in bitter hatred. He hates the aliens who ruled Barbarus, especially the one who raised him, he hates the poisons of his homeworld itself, he hates the Emperor, and most of all he hates himself. Mortarion falls into the trap of constantly comparing what we might have been to what we are - if he’d been found by humans. if he’d landed on a different world. if he’d taken the Emperor up on his offer of aid. if he didn’t need to wear a damn rebreather. Nevertheless he surrounds himself with the trappings of his home, poisons and toxins and rad-weapons because they’re his, dammit, and fuck you for trying to take them away from him. Mortarion keeps slogging onwards with what he’s got because there’s nothing else to him.

Magnus the Red is haughtiness, or ‘ivory-tower intellectualism.’ When you’re willing to learn and Magnus is willing to teach, he’s a great guy. When he’s willing to learn and you’re willing to teach, he’s a great guy. But Magnus has been either student or teacher for most of his life, and he has trouble defining a relationship outside those bounds. He’s that guy who’s an expert on anything he’s studied for five minutes, even though you know he never heard of it six minutes ago. And if you’re better at him than something, well, it’s something he’s never studied. Magnus can be exasperating, and, in considering the fate of his legion, dangerous. The Thousand Sons have a very strong ‘for me and not for thee’ streak to him, delving deeply into study of the warp and sorcerous practices that scream Bad Idea and ignore any attempts to warn them off of it, because they know better. They’re not going to fall into any traps. Even the Council of Nikaea, what should be taken as a dire warning to shape up, does little more than throw Magnus into a extended snitfit about the Emperor’s unwillingness to see things his way.

Horus is, of course, ambition, and ‘pride goeth before a fall.’ When the Emperor retreats from the Crusade to, you know, run the Imperium, Horus takes over the campaign trail personally, spending long years heading up the Imperium’s conquest of the galaxy, and as the awards and adoration and adulation and accolades and other a-words pile up he starts getting it into his head that he ought to be the rightful ruler of the whole shebang. While recovering from wounds on the planet Davin, he’s introduced to the powers of the warp through the warrior lodges there, and so strikes a fateful bargain to sway the greater power of the Imperium’s war machine to his side along with his brothers and topple the Emperor. He becomes a creature unlike any seen before or since, a font of Chaos power such that even the four great powers seem more held than holders of his leash. Drunk on power - both the political and very, very real kinds - it’s not until things fall apart aboard his flagship that Horus realizes how very, very badly he’s fouled up.

Lorgar is zealotry, or to be more accurate ‘you can’t externalize self-righteousness.’ Lorgar frames his mindset as a search for truth, but really what he wants is what everybody wants: to be on the right side. Lorgar’s problem is that he fundamentally cannot internalize the idea that morality is what you do, or to quote Horus Rising ‘we must be mighty because we are right, not right because we are mighty.’ Lorgar grows up steeped in the old faith of Colchis, but when he starts having visions and the existing power structure rejects him, he overthrows it because he knows he’s right, the universe told him he’s right, and when the Emperor shows up he feels validated, and doesn’t even notice how Emps is a little put off by the displays of veneration. When he goes on the Crusade he turns it into a literal religious crusade, stopping at every planet to fully convert it before moving on.

Eventually the Emperor shows up to kick him into gear, because the Word Bearers are the S L O W E S T legion by far and their ties to other legions are fraying and maybe put down some of the religious stuff. Lorgar cannot reconcile this discrepancy between the image of the God-Emperor he believes he understood perfectly and the actual Emperor telling him to cool it and basically dissociates himself into next month. Eventually this one dude named Kor Phaeron who Lorgar’s known since they were kids suggests maybe Lorgar should go back and look at the old faiths again, at which point Lorgar starts digging into a new, and to him, even bigger ‘truth’ than the Emperor. Then a dude from the Sons of Horus arrives and shit goes buckwild. But for all the work he’s done, Lorgar still can’t see himself as anything but a vessel for truth, effectively sheltering himself under the Horus and the Chaos gods instead of the Emperor, and when things go sideways on Terra he all but collapses because he can’t understand how shit’s gone south again.

Alpharius, finally, is the inferiority complex, or ‘don’t define yourself by your relationships to others.’ Alpharius is not only the last primarch, he’s the last primarch to be publicly discovered, so late in the Crusade that the Emperor’s already handed the reins over to Horus. As a result, everyone else has an achievement list as long as their arm and people won’t stop fucking comparing Alpharius and the XX Legion against the others. Alpharius is an A+ tactical commander, but this shit makes him mad as hell. He names the XX the Alpha Legion to emphasize how badass they are and drills the shit out of them at the chapter, company, and even squad level until they know their shit backwards and forwards.

For Alpharius, there’s no question of whose side he’s on, because Horus is his big bro and he doesn’t care for the Emperor. Ironically, despite his keen strategic mind, Alpharius is unable to recognize the bigger picture of how Horus and the other traitor legions are…maybe getting a little sketchy? He just knows this is gonna be his chance to get back at the folks who shit-talked him and his boys. Instead of joining the march on Terra, the Alpha Legion goes across the galaxy, harrying the Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, and the Dark Angels. But unlike Alpharius, Guilliman can stay focused on the big picture, and though delayed it’s ultimately the word of the reinforcements coming in that causes Horus to throw down with the Emperor. Of course the Alpha Legion goes on their merry way, until the fight at Eskrador where Alpharius finally gets to stick it to Bobby G - he dies, but he’s lured the Ultramarines into an untenable position and ultiamtely they’re the ones who have to retreat. But afterwards, the blind spot comes back into play, and the Alpha legion ultimately fragments and goes sailing into the Eye of Terror and the other warpstorms along with the other traitor legions because nobody knows enough of the Plan anymore.

this post got longer than i meant it to be but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what can i say even though it’s been almost a decade now since i stopped seriously following 40k books i still have The Thoughts about the little plastic dudes

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