#Horus Heresy series

[joncronshawauthor]

Jon's Author Diary - August 11, 2023

Hello from sunny Morecambe! Another week, another set of chapters in the bag. I’ve been carrying on with my Substack series ‘Guild of Assassins,’ with two more chapters complete and ready for your eyes. In addition to that, I’ve started writing a new story—a follow-up to ‘Orphan Farm Boy of Destiny’ entitled ‘The Unchosen One.’ I’ll be releasing on my Substack every other Wednesday…for free.…

[nevesmose]

This was the basic play-acting that had somehow built upon itself day by day to create a semblance of a normal life for him in this flat which was by no means a castle with this strange scarred man who was by no means a servant.

I started reading Imperfect and just wanted to make up some other universe in which something nice actually fucking happens to them. So I was really trying to make you feel some feelings this time. Based on my vampire Fulgrim/oblivious Ferrus AU idea and I decided to let it go wherever it wanted to go, good old seat of the pants style.

Tagging @dashofstarlight and @yurihasurunbara due to your interest in the AU idea!

The title isn't just an entertainingly bad pun but also a reference to a song I like that has some ✨️arguably relevant vibes✨️

Also, in the spirit of being as open and honest as possible: I know I make a lot of jokes about a lot of things but I hope it comes across in the story that it's not my intention to do that about trans people or trans experiences. However I'm also aware that I'm writing this from the position of being an autistic cis man for whom this is a fun exercise in smooshing my action figures together without any basis in my own personal experience, so if I'm being unkind or cruel I'd appreciate being told so I can try to do better in the future ❤️

[cav-core]

Also re: that last post, I actually came to TLT because, well I picked it up for a friend but stuck with it because of the "you'll like it, it's just like the other thing you like" factor. TLT has always been my shot chaser to Warhammer.

[yestheantichrist]

happy birthday Horus Heresy Series. you can legally drink now

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

a handy guide to help you determine your reading order of the horus heresy. thoughts?

Very clear. Love the readability. Really conveys the chronological coherency and general smoothness of the series. 10/10

[mechanicussyenjoyer]

Realistic reaction to seeing what the Horus Heresy series is like to read

[moodymisty]

Wanted to ask you because I enjoy your W40k writing so much, I want to get into the books but there are… such much. Do you have any recommendations for a starting point?

🍀

Sooo in terms of where to start, there really isn't a good place. It's like American comic books, but unlike american comic books, at least 40k hasn't been rebooted 75 times XD

But honestly I'd recommend starting with a chapter or faction that interests you the most. That way you are already invested enough in this faction that you enjoy.

If you like Ultramarines the Dark Imperium trilogy is really good, if you like Night Lords then the Night Lords Omnibus (ala the Talos Valkoran series) is an absolute MUST read. Like even if you don't like night lords, you'll probably still like that series. The Beasts arises series has been good so far, apart from the gav thorpe stinker.

If you like Black Templars and Admech, the lords/priests/gods of mars books are pretty good. Necrons The Infinite in the Divine is a must read also. Knight of Talassar is the Sicarius omnibus but i haven't read it, but i've heard it's good. i can't vouch yet though.

There's also the primarch novels, The Konrad one Night Haunter and the Alpharius ones seem to be the hits which i agree with. the konrad one is very good.

As for the elephant in the room; With the Horus Heresy novels, they all seem very intimidating, but you don't have to read them all in order. Most are pretty self contained, as it's more of a series about telling tons of stories in one timeline. Obviously they are connected a bit, but I had no problem reading them separate.

Betrayer is an amazing one if you like Angron, The First Heretic is good if you like Lorgar and his piss kink, Deliverance lost is good for Raven Guard, Fulgrim is amazing as well if you want to really go into Fulgrim and Ferrus' relationship.

I hope this is helpful! I just kind of vomited my thoughts rather than organizing. obviously there is way more books but i feel like these are a few good ones, and none require a fuckton of other stuff to understand what's going on.

[the-raven-lady]

Psychoanalyst anon here. ‘Why does every warhammer x reader fan have a breeding kink?’ ‘why do we keep writing about astartes nutting inside us??’ Look, and I’m metaphorically grabbing you by shoulders here, 99% of the x reader fics everyone writes are about the Horus Heresy narrative. The very famous 60-something book series called the Horus Heresy. The very famous book series about a family tragedy.

The entire premise of it is not only about daddy issues, but also about how extremist beliefs destroy families, and it’s also about how you can never leave a family, no matter how hard you try. 10,000 years in and every single space marine still carries a legion/chapter specific bit of trauma with them, I mean take a look at the blood angels, they straight up have their dad’s ptsd. It’s not something any of the marines or the primarchs or the custodes can’t run away from, a tapestry cannot run from the thread it’s weaved from, a person cannot run from the genetics that created them. And the genetics that created them are like, the literal worst, straight up coloniser dna.

In many books they refer to each other as ‘blood relations’, and in many books that blood is spilt over and over and over again. On first glance the space marines, primarchs, and custodes seem to be just a parody on that ‘manly macho man’ trope, but the closer you look at it you start to realise that it’s all about the cyclical nature of generational trauma.

So is it really that surprising that a lot of people who enjoy the ‘worst family ever’ book series would also have a breeding kink about it? I think that what we’re doing is just engaging with the source material in a meaningful and slightly kinky way.

The other reason for why most people here have a breeding kink about it is even more obvious. The entire kink is just a part of your brain that controls reproduction going a tiny bit overdrive sometimes. And how could it not? The characters in the HH series are always described as either being the most gorgeous, powerful, or intimidating people to ever appear in your pitiful baseline field of vision. So of course the ‘maybe I should have kids’ part of your brain would fixate on a big strong beautiful guy that could protect from all harm.

Especially so when it comes to the primarchs, because that’s literally how the Emperor intended them to work. ‘You see how hot this man is? Yes? You want your kids to be 50% him, don’t you? Well congrats because you can! All you have to do is just send any young children you already have to your nearest astartes initiate program-’

But again, I’m not a licensed anything so don’t take my word for it. I don’t know your brain.

Thank you for blessing my inbox. I'm sorry I fell asleep before you appeared.

I know for me personally, my breeding kink existed far before any interaction with 40k. I actually think the assessment of "Big man who is pretty" is closer to my side of things than the daddy issues side of 40k.

Now that I'm sober, I posit another explanation as an addition to what you've already given: It ties back into domination and devotion.

Being marked and claimed by someone large and powerful who can protect you definitely appeals to the lizard brain, but I think there's a little bit more to the consensual domination of being marked with someone's seed that appeals to me personally. And generally, the before, during, and after tend to be full of praises and devotionals and excitement from your opposite. "You're going to look so good carrying my children," etc. Getting doted on and taken care of by a devoted partner is probably the second largest appeal to me, but you've already eaten us alive over that and left no crumbs, so I digress.

I appreciate

[joncronshawauthor]

Jon's Author Diary - July 28, 2023 - Guild of Assassins, Horus Heresy

Welcome back to my Author Diary!  In this week’s episode, I share my progress on writing my book, Guild of Assassins, with three chapters completed and a first draft for a fourth one. You can catch these chapters as they go live on my Substack in the upcoming weeks: https://joncronshawauthor.substack.com. I also delve into my current read – the 20th book of the Horus Heresy series, The…

[nevesmose]

From birth, it seemed, all Nostramans understood the concept of a protection racket. In her more introspective moments - rare, now, and getting rarer with every mission - Revila thought this was perhaps what made her people such effective warriors in the Great Crusade.

She sat, flight helmet on and spinal plugs engaged, cocooned in the silent near-darkness of her cockpit. Around her, the hangar bay of the VIII Legion strike cruiser Acerodon was as calm and quiet as she had ever known it. Only a few servitors, techpriests and legion serfs still moved around, making last-minute checks and benedictions to either her own vessel, a sleek Wrath fighter craft, or the single midnight-blue Thunderhawk being readied nearby.

Only two vessels would take to the void this night.

The planet they orbited, Revila knew, had been first brought to compliance by the Ultramarines. A reasonable show of force and reasonable discussion between reasonable fellow humans had won the day. 

Yet another leaf was added to the XIII Legion's heaving laurels and the world's tithes had been meticulously provided. For a time, at least.

Then, just as reasonably, the inhabitants decided that they would, on balance, rather not take part in the Great Crusade. Pict-captures had been broadcast across the sector showing a statue of Guilliman being craned down from its plinth in the planetary capital and the new planetary governor, if the title still applied, making an address to his people.

It was this footage that had captured the interest of the Night Lords - the Astartes had found it so compelling that they watched it over and over again, the same loop of the Thirteenth Primarch being hoisted up into the air to rotate stoically in the background of the governor's speech.

In mortal humans, Revila thought, this could be seen as uncharitably crowing over another's ill fortune. Of course it would be singularly unhealthy to be overheard accusing the Astartes of such pettiness, and when asked about it they merely insisted they were being conscientious warriors in the mould of the Ultramarines themselves, making sure to take in every detail of the enemy before making their attack.

On Nostramo, people who developed stiff spines about their gang debts tended to find themselves losing their kneecaps, or fingers, or eyes, or family members until they changed their minds. The same concept applied here, she thought.

But you can't kneecap or flense or blind a whole planet, some people said. Revila agreed up to a point - your arms would get tired eventually - but she knew, had seen herself, that the VIII Legion could and would if they felt it necessary.

In this case they didn't feel it necessary. A more merciful, exemplary act was planned instead. The Night Lords would give the rebel governor one last appearance on all of his planet's pict and vox channels, putting their trust in his world's inhabitants to choose the correct course of action afterwards. Few other Legions would show such benevolence.

The Wrath was ratcheted into launch position and Revila found herself looking directly down at the pristine blue-green orb below. She realised distantly that she didn't even know what the planet was called.

"Thirty seconds to launch, Violator One-Seven," the voice of Acerodon's flight controller grated through her helmet vox feed. "Good hunting."

Not important, she supposed. It would have a new name by sunrise.

[skunts-own-truth]

My pal Nick, who started reading the Horus Heresy in September 2023, is now on Eye of Terra after reading each book in the series in published order, and all of the Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin books. 😭 This dude went from reading 0 books since high school to reading 30+ in a year. So proud of him, he’ll be done with the series in the blink of an eye.

[kirklandcultist]

The Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind is a Pansexual Genderfluid Furry (Eagle Fursona) and if you think I’m wrong go read the Horus Heresy series.

[quasitsqueeries]

The Emperor wasn't 12 feet tall

I see this meme a lot in my Instagram feed and it really grinds my gears:

Not because it seems to be trying to shame a fictional antagonist for being "wrong" (although that really doesn't help), but because whoever made it seems to have missed that depictions of the Emperor as superhuman are meant to be Imperial Propaganda.

Now, I realise I'm going to be fighting an uphill battle here because there seem to be people working for Games Workshop and producing their media who also missed that memo, and for a while now the studio has started producing actual depictions of the Emperor, and some of those depections show him as 12 feet tall and immortal. This might be controversial but I think what this shows is that Games Workshop don't understand Games Workshop's source material.

Here's a picture of the Emperor from the original Rogue Trader rulebook.

Even this is obviously meant to be a propaganda image, but here he looks like just a regular guy in armour, he's about the same size as the people around him. Not a superhuman, just a guy with an excess of hubris.

There's this literary construct called the unreliable narrator. When I studied literature we were given this short story to read called Bartleby the Scrivener. It's told from the point of view of an employer about a clerk who was apparently really difficult to manage. The subtext is that the narrator is trying to manipulate the reader to make themself look good.

For a long time, that's what Warhammer 40,000 did, the Imperium was made out to be an unreliable narrator. Stories about the Imperium's "glorious past" were told through the haze of ten thousand years of unending war, by an ecclesiastical class with a vested interest in keeping Imperial citizens committed to feeding the war machine. To the Imperium, the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy serve the function of myths, more than history. I've gone on before about how important heroic figures like Siegfried and Perseus and Prometheus were to the Nazis. The Imperium, being a fictional state that draws on the aesthetics and ideology of Fascism, uses the figures of the Emperor and Primarchs the same way.

Basically what I'm saying is that when Imperial sources state that these people were twelve feet tall and immortal and could, um, turn a giant ork into a lightbulb on a whim, it's not because they had these powers, but because they've been ascribed these powers by their priesthood, who have total control over the flow of information in this setting.

And I get that this is hard, because most people don't get taught this stuff, and often people are probably looking for escapism from their fiction and why would the book I'm reading lie to me? But I think it really makes the setting more interesting if you look at it this way.

Also, I realise that since 2006 there have been books around that describe the Emperor, and they do show him as superhuman, and I think those depictions are based on the writers misunderstanding the material they're working from. I guess Tolkien wrote the existence of The Hobbit into Middle Earth as the Red Book of Westmarch so I can tell myself that the Horus Heresy novels are meant to be in-universe Imperial propaganda.

ADDENDUM: I need to add this because I've been reading about Perpetuals, which is apparently what the Emperor is since the Horus Heresy series was published. Apparently these individuals are human mutants that are both immortal and invincible. I remember Mechanicum heavily implying that the Emperor and St. George are the same person. Here's the problem with that. There are two themes that I think are really important in Warhammer 40,000. One is the Emperor's hubris, the idea was that he was playing god, genetically engineering monstrosities in the form of the primarchs. In the Greek tragic mould, it's this hubris that leads to his downfall. This kind of loses its sting if he's just trying to recreate what what he already is.

The other theme is the Imperium's superstition. This one is really the core of 40K. The Imperium has taken the corpse of a man who tried to rule the galaxy, told themselves he's not dead, plugged the corpse into a machine that "regenerates" him, and founded an intolerant, violent and expansionist religion around this husk. This theme changes significantly if the Emperor actually was as powerful as the Ecclesiarchy makes him out to be, and actually isn't dead, and has somehow been regenerating for the last 10,000 years. There's a question here about what would make an entity worthy of worship, or being called a god, and I probably shouldn't get into it but this is my blog so I'm going to. It seems like there's an assumption among some writers that if something can be rationally explained then it's not a god, because gods ipso facto don't exist. They've incorporated nonexistence into their definition of gods. This is where you get the idea that the Chaos gods aren't gods, because the setting explains their existince "rationally" with its internal logic (nevermind that there's nothing rational about the warp). If there were gods in a rational sense, then our model of the universe would have to change to accomodate them. I think the upshot of this is basically that if what the Horus Heresy novels claim about the Emperor is true, then the Ecclesiarchy are right and he is a god within the logic of the setting. That doesn't justify the genocide and expansionism, but maybe it does justify the worship, and that's something that I think takes away from the setting.

[ghostinthegallery]

As a transformers fan I love robots who have divorce drama stretching millions of years but also have a body count in the trillions. Thus it has taken little convincing but I think I shall investigate these undead robots.

In the event of my death I'm Telling. This is your fault. How do I start wading into this mess bc my only encounter with Warhammer was when a very drunk frat guy tried to explain the horus heresy at a party.

Well you are in for a treat then! Robots with marriage/divorce drama, severe mental health issues, and body counts best measured on a planetary scale are our specialty in Chez Necron.

If you want a setting overview before you dive in, Bricky's two part series going over all the factions is quite solid. Long, but hey this has been around since the 80s. (no drunken Horus Heresy rambles*)

First, watch this clip of Trazyn the Infinite, as an amuse bouche before your meal.

As for books, there are two main places I'd start for necrons:

The Infinite and the Divine- the classic starting point for necrons (and 40k in general). Trazyn the Infinite, lord of the Prismatic Galleries, battles against Orikan the Diviner, master chronomancer and prophet. Clash of godlike beings over...what amounts to a magic Rubik's Cube. It's so petty. This fight spans epochs, multiple wars, and one legal case. There's no heterosexual explanation for their dynamic. Also this book has dinosaurs. Some of whom carry shuriken canons.

Now, this book has a ton of 40k stuff. Most major factions make an appearance so there's a very good chance there will be words/things that a new person is unfamiliar with. If that doesn't bother you, awesome! Proceed. Ask me things, I'll explain that an aeldar is just a space elf or whatever. Or watch a lore vid beforehand. However if that is a turn off I'd recommend starting with...

Severed- Novella, so shorter which is nice. Do you like angst? The horrors of immortality? Lord/knight love story? One very silly guy? Then meet Zahndrekh and his loyal bodyguard Obyron as they set out to conquer a planet where the necrons are...wrong. Complicating factors include Obyron's crippling depression, Zahndrekh's asshole ex, and the fact Zahndrekh is insane and believes them all to still be the creatures of flesh and blood they were before a bunch of star gods ate their souls and turned them into robots. Prepare to cry.

After those, I cannot recommend the Twice Dead King duology highly enough. Oltyx, an exiled prince attempts to save his dynasty from destruction while battling his own creeping madness. He's got an adorable crush on his hot best friend. The voices in his head were put there on purpose so its fine. Well most of them were. Everything is fine. I didn't cry multiple times reading these...

Then refer to my reading guide for the good short stories and boom! The wonderful world of gay undead space robots is open before you.

I accept full responsibilities for my actions. If you die I promise to say mostly nice things at your funeral.

*mini rant, but I honestly think the Horus Heresy is one of the worst ways to introduce someone to the 40k world. It's a series with like 70 books! Many of them are bad! You need a flowchart to keep track of the timeline! I know there's some good books and characters, power to all who love the HH, but it is not newbie friendly! Also it only has humans which robs you of some of the best parts of the setting (like...y'know. Necrons). Ease people in, then they can make an informed decision about tackling the mountain of buff space men with daddy issues shooting each other.

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Been listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast about Vince McMahon. The sweeping epic of this abusive, ruthless, self-centered, politically-minded carnival barker engineering an army of chemically mutated baby-men to play at being superheroes in a never-ending series of conflicts got me thinking; how viable is the Warhammer Wrestling Federation?

The viability is so strong that it would actually be incredibly doable to retell the entire Horus Heresy through a marathon series of narrative wrestling matches.

[sistersorrow]

Today in "fandom is a wonderful thing" for the last couple of weeks, r/Grimdank (Warhammer 40k meme sub) have been constructing an AU based on a series of memes by /u/Sweet_older-Sister about what it would be like to date genderbent versions of the Primarchs

Highlights include:

Lorgar is the most popular Primarch on the subreddi

Erebus send's Lorgar's Little Light to Monarchia and will suffer eternally for it

Russ once had to take her SO to the apothecary after she gave them one drop of her ale and they were hit with triple liver failure

Konrad is haunted by the knowledge they're gonna be murdered by the only person she ever loved

Angron gets to experience something other than blinding rage all the time

The God Emperor is the galaxy's angriest father-in-law

The discourse about women Custodians is now dead in the water cause we're all to busy simping for >9ft tall muscle mommies

Lorgar ends up leading the Heresy instead of Horus because her SO was on Monarchia and is now on a mission to kill God

Angron doesn't join the Heresy due to the aforementioned emotional stability

Malcador is like a cool uncle now who makes sure Jimmy Space doesn't murder his new in-laws

Mortarion still won't take a bath in anything other than chemial weapons

All the Primarch's SO's hang out

They may be part of a greater conspiracy to prevent the Horus Heresy

Konrad has discovered she loves hot chocolate

All the Primarchs are implicitly bi or pan