#luther 40k

[dongnan001]

Tried to translate this one of my favorite memes I draw.And it contains almost everything I know about Dark Angels(.

1.left:Zahariel,right:Luther

2.left:Ezekiel,right:Azrael

3.left:Belial,right:Sammael

4.left:Sapphon,right:Asmodai

5.Astelan

6.Lion El'Jonson

[jinian-ginias]

WH40k Commission log p1 sangy P2 emps P3-4 luther

[incorrect-primarchs-quotes]

[dese-o]

He might be a jerk, but he is a fun jerk :)

Podrá ser un cretino, pero un cretino divertido :)

[ladymirdan]

Day 4 of my 40k Advent Calender:

Nemiel/Zahariel & Luther/Lion El’Johnson

[battlecatbeta]

The Fallen.

[i-cant-believe-it-s-not-grimdark]

Warhammer characters as Onion/Reductress headlines 2/?

[nighthaunting]

registering my prediction for the big warhammer ‘lion's back’ plot-twist right now so that if it happens i can be supremely vindicated and if not everyone can laugh:

"i think cypher has been luther all along and he escaped from gay baby space jail fell through a time portal and has been running around being mysterious"

why is he apparently a full marine now instead of just a augmented guy? chaos. don't think too hard about it.

why has he done any of the stuff he's done as cypher? he was in a wormhole and had some personal revelations and it's none of your business.

eventually cypher brings lion's sword back to him is revealed as luther this whole time secretly and then they kiss and make up or something idk

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Wait… the pre-human inhabitants of Davin worshipped SATAN? Is satan real in 40k? What

The likely canon reason is that "Seytan" is an undivided daemon of some kind that works to prime different societies for a transition to chaos worship.

The meta reason is likely that the book just wanted a reference to Satanism, linking the religion to chaos worship for tongue in cheek reasons. 40k likes to tap its nose and chuckle coyly at all the references and events it puts into things.

As far as 40k referencing events and cultures goes, it's fairly mild. Could be worse. Could be implying that the Cabal murdered Martin Luther King. Thank fuck they'd never do that. Right?

[hydrasbane1]

So I have a warhammer 30k/40k headcannon, that is . . . It feels luke warm as a take but I love sharing it so here I go: "Lion El Johnson is gay" now I don't mean this in the tee hee he is named after a gay poet, the legions name is named after one of his poems that is kinda gay and the rock is a gay bar. I mean, the man is homosexual (serious), and his legion's propensity with secrets is a direct response to the fact he spent the great crusade/ the horus heresy in the closet.

Caliban, by all accounts, was a techno-barbarian world following a template of mideval Europe. Which did not exactly have the best track record with the lgbtq community. So imagine you are the lion in all of this: all you know is that you are apart from these men who you fight with on top of strange feelings towards some of them that either A) no one can help you understand or B) you have seen people get actively killed for somthing similar. So, no wonder your ass would be DEEP in the closet. (Plus, I also headcannon that he had a crush on Luther). When he met the emperor, I doubt that the emperor would have telling one of his tools "its OK to be gay," high on the list of things to say. Plus, the inherent conservatism in the great crusade would probably lead the lion to continue to keep himself in the closet.

As for the legions' secrecy, there is a level of genetic memory that connects the space marines to the primarch, meaning that I could see the hidden shame of being gay would pass down to his sons. Now I don't think that they all would become gay from the Geneseed cause that would be dumb af BUT I could see them having a cloud of shame that they can't identify so they attach it to somthing else before the betrayal of luther i.e. shame that they collect trophies, shame that they are vain, etc.

But the betrayal of Luther was such a group trauma that it gave them something to connect their shame. So in 40k the genetic predisposition to secrecy and shame shows itself in their obsession with the fallen. (Paralelling the self hating gays that often go after people who are "too gay"). This also explains why the dark angels are the only legion to be so focused on traitors despite like every legion having some traitors.

The best part about this is how it connects to the return of the lion and the redemption of the fallen. It's been 10k years, and he has reflected on his actions and beliefs, and he has forgiven his sons for their shame, and he is slowly forgiving himself. He and his sons are realizing that the fallen are their brothers and they don't need to be ashamed of them. And honestly, I like that as a redemption story of people who didn't know how they needed to be redeemed.

[historitor-bookshelf]

"Descent of Angels" is done. Really fun read, even if it took a while to return to the usual Warhammer Bolter Porn.

The tragic bromance between Luther and the Lion is something, even if it hasn't ended lethal (yet). Still oof.

And while 40k Lion has mellowed out quite a bit you can still see parts of his character from 40k in his 30k version, or at least how he comes across to others. Boy, he sure is intense.

And we do have our first glimpse of Big E in this book.

It's still technically filler though. I mean, it's good filler, but filler nonetheless. I know it sets a lot of things up for the Lion's and the Dark Angels storylines, but a whole book was not really necessary. Don't get me wrong, it was hella fun and... Okay, it was definitely better than Fulgrim.

So... Legion is next on the list.

[dongnan001]

If...the Grand Master was drunk.

Zahariel:Help me...!

[deflare]

Welcome to the first day of me popping open my Warhammer 40k Advent Calendar. Appropriately enough, on our first day, we start with the First: a Dark Angel!

Unfortunately, I’ve never cared about the Dark Angels, so I don’t actually know a ton about them compared to other chapters. Good start for the calendar.

Repent! For tomorrow you die!

The Dark Angels were the First Legion, in that they were the first ones the Emperor created to serve in his armies. Their practices would become the basis for how all the other legions would operate, the basic template to be edited. And they were total pricks about it.

Ironically, the First would be reunited with their Primarch, Lion El’Jonson*, pretty late in the Crusade. Up to that point, the First was dealing with some real problems with being prideful and unwilling to change, which had messed them up real bad in their wars. The Lion renamed them the Dark Angels, and led them to glory, yadda yadda. During the Heresy, the Dark Angels started out far away from Terra; they’d spend the war doing some big campaigns and messing up the traitor legions’ homeworlds.

At the end of the war, they went back to the Lion’s homeworld of Caliban, only to get shot at. Turns out, the Dark Angels that had stayed on the planet along with the Lion’s adoptive dad, Luther, had decided to turn to Chaos**; they had to go conquer the place, and in the process, the Lion got mortally wounded and got put into suspended animation (like father, like son), to return in the time of his sons’ greatest need. Now, every single loyalist legion had elements that went traitor and became Chaosy. For reasons that have never been clear to me, the Dark Angels thought it was a HUGE problem for them to have their own traitor elements, and they’ve spent the subsequent 10,000 years being super paranoid about guarding the secret and hunting down the traitors (and anyone who knows about the traitors), called the Fallen.

The Dark Angels were always kind of horny for secrets and faint cultism, which only grew under their Primarch. They had a whole complicated set of different wings and orders within the legion that specialized in different forms of warfare. The modern chapter retains two of them: the Deathwing, a veteran company that fights in super-heavy armor painted bone white, and the Ravenwing, a light formation focused on going really fast with motorcycles and landspeeders and the like (and who are also the primary hunters of the Fallen). The whole chapter is set up as a mystery cult, with troopers learning more and more about their grimdark history and their grimdark rituals as they rise through the ranks.

Aesthetically, the Dark Angels tend to lean into a Medieval Knight kind of look, with some Arthurian elements sprinkled in (see: the Lion is a King Under the Mountain). They really like wearing robes and tabards, or big winged knights’ helmets. They also have Weird Little Guys: the Watchers in the Dark. They’re mysterious little Jawa-sized folks who live on Calaban and do menial work for the Dark Angels, like holding books and swords; they also keep watch over the Lion’s body, and they disrupt nearby psykers. What are they? Why haven’t they been murdered by the xenophobic Imperium? What’s their goals? Who knows. But look at this little guy.

*Yes, the father of the Dark Angels was named after Lionel Johnson, author of the poem “Dark Angel”. Buckle up, because the names do not get any less goofy from here.

**What is Chaos?

Well, the big thing to know is that in 40k, our physical reality is accompanied by another dimension called the Warp. It’s a realm of non-material that’s fundamentally affected by the thoughts and emotions of sapient beings in real-space. And because the Warhammer universe is a miserable, awful place, the strongest emotions that have affected the Warp are things like rage, sorrow, greed, and megalomania.

The Warp is important; it’s where psykers draw their magic powers from, and it’s how human ships can travel faster than light. But it’s also dangerous. Over the millennia, the suffering and emotions in the Warp have congealed into several powerful, malevolent consciousnesses, powerful as gods: Khorne (murder, bloodshed, rage), Nurgle (rot, sickness, sorrow), Tzeentch (magic, change, ambition), and Slaanesh (greed, ecstasy, perfectionism). Each of them also has hordes of demons--sorry, ‘daemons’, this is a British game--that are always itching to go through any hole in reality to go fuck up real-space. These are the corruptive powers of Chaos, whose very nature is to seek out places that aren’t Chaosy and make them a bit more gruesome.

The Chaos gods can’t go running into realspace all willy-nilly. They need agents. Psykers are inherent gateways to Chaos, which is why the Imperium tends to hate them and go witch-hunting. They’re also aided by a galaxy full of cultists who work to open up portals to the Warp, so that the daemons can come rampaging through. Horus’ rebellion started as a mundane power grab, striking a bargain with the Dark Powers to aid in the fight; as time went on, they got more and more lost in the sauce, and now most of the remaining traitor Astartes are fully worshipers of the dark gods.

Every day, the Imperium continues their grim wars against Chaos, fighting daemons on the battlefield and hunting down any sign of cults within their society. Going to war against the concept of ‘warfare’, going into an ecstasy of Emperor-worship to ward off the concept of ‘ecstasy’, killing billions in the name of fighting ‘death/decay’, keeping infinite secrets to fight the concept of ‘secrecy’...  it’s going about as well as you’d expect. Chaos is going to eat the Imperium someday, if the aliens don’t get to them first. Maybe then, the gods will starve, having finally extinguished their source of fuel. Cold comfort for the people who died along the way, though.

Master post here

[incorrect-primarchs-quotes]

Luther finds Lion

[sharkneto]

hi! could you perhaps give some writing tips for writing angst or short stories? i want to start writing and since i love tua i wanted to try some short stories about five during the apocalypse. tho i also kinda want to learn how to portray characters correctly <3

So, knowing me, this will probably get long. So Part 1: Short Stories and Angst and Part 2: Writing In-Character

Part 1: Short Stories and Angst

Idk how qualified I am for giving advice on writing short stories. I just, sit down to write and stop when it's done. Sometimes that's 1k words, sometimes that's 40k. A quick google says a short story is under 10k words, so that's what we'll work with. Writing a couple thousand word fic isn't actually all that much of a different process than writing a thirty thousand fic - it's just a question of scale. A short fic is going to have a simple premise, that's straightforward and you can set up in a couple hundred to a thousand words (the Umbrellas found a horse, Five is drunk and cut his finger, Klaus and Five are having a bad day and go to the zoo). Don't get hung up on if your premise is "big enough", is enough of a plot - slice of life is my bread and butter and is popular for a reason. None of the above premises are anything big or have particularly high stakes (come back to this in a second). Simple plot means simple structure which is how short stories stay short. Set up, problem, solution. Honestly, you don't even have to solve the problem as long as you still wrap it up in some way (in Lonely Drunk, Luther solves the problem of Five being Too Drunk by getting him to bed, but doesn't have any solution for the overall problem to stop future drunkness). Tell the scene/story you want to tell and get out (or don't, but then you're not telling a short story anymore, which is also fine and happens to the best of us).

Now, up there I hedged that short story = low stakes, which is not true and is where ~angst~ comes in. How much and which emotions you bring into a story is all about word choice and pacing. Take my Lend a Hand vs... Simple. Both are about 4.5k words. One is a fic in which Five destroys his hand to save Luther from vivisection. The other is Five and Diego walking in a park and talking about how to make friends. Different Vibes in the same number of words.

So, how do you use words and pacing to write angst, as that is what you're specifically asking about. For angst to work, you need your readers to 1) empathize with the character getting whumped and 2) hurt because of it. Fanfic helps with 1 because we already care about the characters coming in as we're looking to read more about them. You can help up the empathy in the Set Up by putting them in danger, giving them a difficult situation, etc. For 2, some of the best writing advice I ever got is from This Post on how to write pain - you don't just say "they hurt", you describe how they hurt. Ye old Show vs Tell. Write around the pain until we can see the shape of it anyway. Save hard-hitting synonyms for peak action/emotion so they hit harder in contrast to more subdued word choice before it. Play with pacing. Short, choppy sentences read faster and are good for fights, shock, and pain. Long, descriptive sentences are good to build tension and making those fast sentences faster by contrast. Alternatively, run-on sentences for effect work similarly to fast choppy ones - no periods and no commas mean readers don't get a chance to take a breath. Paragraph breaks slow your reader down, so use that to pace them. A series of short action sentences go fast in one big paragraph together. Single sentences in paragraphs by themselves slow the reader down for shock or realizations or emphasis on a particular action. Mix all these basics up to craft the exact speed and emotion you want to hit. It's a fun lil puzzle.

Part 2: Characterization

Writing characters is just practice. When we're reading, especially fanfic, we have an idea of when a character would or wouldn't say or do something they're doing in the fic. So, break down why you know that and you can start writing the character in the right shape on your own. When reading or watching the source material, pay attention to how a character talks, what motivates them, when they're nice versus when they're mean, how they interact with other characters, etc. You can't drop a character into a completely new scenario you made up and have them act in-character until you understand why they're going to do what they're going to do in that situation.

This takes practice, and there's not necessarily one correct way to write a character - different people pick up on different things, have different angles of emphasis for their understanding. There's also canon-interpretation of characters vs headcanon and fanon-interpretations. The older a show and the larger the fandom, the more prevalent the headcanons and fanon-interpretation is going to be. Personally, I prefer to stay as close to canon as I can, but I'm definitely not immune to fanon and I definitely have my personal headcanons. And, there isn't anything wrong with accepting fanon, just recognize it's a specific interpretation of the character. If you feel like you're falling more into a fanon-interpretation than you'd like, you can always take a dip back to the source material for a character and characterization refresher.

But, what does this breaking down of a character to understand them look like? Let's do it with Five, my favorite guy. Five is a fifty-eight-year-old man who's stuck looking thirteen. He lived for four decades alone in the apocalypse with his plastic wife and then became the Commission's best assassin. He's trying to stop the apocalypse. These experiences shape how he talks - he uses old-timey phrases, both because he's old and because he's not familiar with the modern world. He's not polite and he's quick to snap because he has little social practice and is under immense pressure to stop the apocalypse. How do they shape how he approaches problems? He resorts to violence relatively quickly, because he was an assassin and (again) has little experience in talking to diffuse situations, but he will choose trying to diffuse over violence when he can. What motivates Five? Stopping the apocalypse is the surface answer. Why does he want to stop the apocalypse? Because he found his whole family dead in it when he was thirteen years old. He is actually motivated by his family. Five is a genius but dumb (because lacking social and real-world experience and his ego). He loves an insane amount (chosen survival mechanism was to create a person to love, survived the apocalypse to save his family). Etc, etc, etc...

You just keep breaking characters down like this until you've hit the level you feel like you understand them. And then it just comes down to practice. It took me a good 15 fics before I was comfortable writing Klaus. Imagine characters saying your dialogue, doing what you're making them do, and see if it feels like they would do that. If it's out of character, it might still be in-character, depending on what pressures you're putting them under. If a character is acting out of character, it could be you have a hole in your plot you need to fix - the plot should be pushing the characters to get to the climax and resolution, they should not be walking there by themselves unprompted. If rewriting happens, rewriting happens. I had to rewrite the alley-dumpster fight in HIT because I forgot to destroy the briefcase in it and I realized if there was a briefcase floating around, Five would immediately break my plot (I have a grudging empathy for TUA writers in how easily Five can break plots - it just means you have to get more creative). It's a fun mental dance that I enjoy quite a bit.

At the end of the day, though, the whole point is to have fun. The best way to get better at writing and figure it out is to just do it.

Happy writing :)

[ladymirdan]

Descent of Angels, third take. This time I actually finished it.

I stand by my first take. Easily the most entertaining out of the 6 HH books ive read so far. It didn't make me want to kill myself out of boredom (well maybe about 10% of the book I did).

I wish I could say I enjoyed all of it, but that would be a lie. Kind of weak part 4. But right by the ending it was kind of nice again. I wish it would have kept that wondrous adventure tone the whole way through but alas we had to cut to very barebones and predictable human/imperial politics.

in comparison how the 40k Ultramarine books (excluding Ventris books they lacks this too) handle imperial politics, this was very black and white, good imperium/bad compliance planet. It felt lazy and lacked nuance. Which is wild since they gave the first “bad guy” in the story a lot of nuance and you had a feeling there was more to his story than was first let on by the Lion and Luther. It was as if the compliance part was written by another author completely.

Im gonna stand by my conspiracy theory that this wasnt ment to be a Horus heresy book when they started writing it, and that they just mushed it in there with some added parts.

This book juat reaffimed my “why the hell dont they tell more stories about neophytes learning to become space marines, that shit is dope as fuck”-sentiment.

But also. Im not gonna lie, the Lion is way more fun then I expected him to be. He is one shady bitch and I like that. 😅

And for all their secrets, man are the Dark Angels a bunch of gossip girls 😂

Ps. Im prepared to be told I'm wrong about this book since I haven't heard a single person say anything good at all about it. Even one of my DA friends thinks it kind of shit.

(and if the recent polls are anything to go by, I'm a contrarian by nature who always picks the least popular option for some fuckińg reason. Do you guys have any idea what I would give to be boring like the rest of you? Imagine just liking popular things, life would be so fucking good.)