Good anti-Imperium of Man fappery essays.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 1:08 pm

Still can't hear you over the sound of chainsaws, maglag. Please go back to reread the first six phrases of my initial post.

Zinegata wrote: That people still think Eisenhorn is still a "good guy" by the conclusion of the series and that his evolution was "natural" only demonstrates how well Abnett managed to pull off the banality of evil trope.

I pretty much agree with everything you said, but just want to point out Eisenhorn was never a good guy. One of the first things he does in the first book is, IIRC, is rationalizing his refusal to mercy kill a bunch of doomed and horribly suffering people by the pragmatic need to avoid what, as we see soon enough, could have amounted to moderate inconvenience at most.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 1:58 pm

@maglag
your point?

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:24 pm

Stahlseele wrote:@maglag
your point?

That even if you pretend the IoM never did anything evil like Fatr is trying to do, deafened by the sounds of a zillion chainsaws killing a zillion innocents to meet holy terra's daily quota of suffering of genocide, there's nothing more. The IoM never did anything good, so if you remove all the bad bits, then there's nothing beyond that, only renegade planets that were never a part of the IoM to begin with (besides being in the "exterminatus as soon as possible" list).

Again, the IoM's government literally runs in suffering as more human souls are fed to the golden mummy to keep their daemon-based communication network running. No sacrificed souls sacrificed every day, the IoM can't collect taxes, there can be no inquisition, there can be no IoM. Or they could use the Tau systems, but that's HERESY! Unless I missed the memo where the Imperial Guard stopped using flashlights and started using real runs, like pulse rifles, the Tau can mass-produce those no problem, should be no problem for humies, right? No, the IoM orders you to keep using the flaslights and don't try to reproduce the perfectly safe and efficient xeno tech.

Maybe Fatr thinks the IoM sends their communications through magic rainbows of happyness? He's confusing 40K with MLP then.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:49 pm

Uh, dude, Tau FTL tech is shit. They get like a sixth of the speed of IoM ships, and their FTL comms don't exist. It's their primary strategic weakness. Hell, their motivation in the Medusa V global campaign was taking control of a bunch of ancient warp monitoring stations to learn how the hell everyone is able to go so much faster than they are.

Also, Astropaths do not contact daemons for communication and in fact are vastly more resistant to daemonic possession than other psykers. Incidentally, they also wouldn't stop working if the Astronomicon went down, but the soul-binding ritual that burns out their eyes and makes them resistant to possession does require the Emperor to still be alive.

And also, the Imperium doesn't perform Exterminatus as a matter of course. It is in general reserved for situations where the planet is irrevocably fucked; mass incursions of Enslavers from the warp, Tyranids overrunning it, warp influence to the point that a ground assault is completely untenable, that sort of thing. Checking the Lexicanum, the Astral Claws were ground down and defeated in a lengthy campaign terminating in a multi-chapter assault on their capital city after their Chapter Master up and seceded and opened fire on loyalist fleets.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:07 pm

IoM 30k is pretty damn rad.
IoM 40k is pretty much bullshit.
EoM - before the long night, at the dark age of technology - was much better than the pretty damn rad IoM of 30K.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:08 pm

name_here wrote:Uh, dude, Tau FTL tech is shit. They get like a sixth of the speed of IoM ships...

I think the argument was that Tau FTL is possible at all, not just as good as Imperium FTL. Don't forget this is in the context of an argument about the moral worth of the Imperium as an institution.

Imperium FTL is powered by a giant furnace you stick innocent people in at random every day. Accepting slower travel speeds seems like a no-brainer when faced with that option, but the Imperium doesn't give any consideration to investigating the Tau way. They would just look at you funny for even suggesting saving innocent lives had any worth. Its just people, they would say, we have plenty of those to spare. What are a few billion souls in service of the Emperor?

And that's why Tau having FTL at all shows the Imperium to be a cartoonish authoritarian nightmare state.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:17 pm

The thousands of sacrifices to the necronomicon . . err astronomicon . . every day are unsanctioned(read dangerous) psionics that would endanger entire worlds by their mere presence, if i remember that correctly.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:22 pm

Well, kinda. They're psykers who the Imperium for some reason thinks aren't worth making sanctionites. Sometimes they're extremely dangerous, sometimes they're just too weak to be worth the effort. All of them can potentially get possessed by daemons, and psykers have enough trouble with that after being trained as sanctionites, so something does need to be done with them, but a good number of them could be trained rather than killed.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:32 pm

The Imperium is very big, and it is likely that a utilitarian analysis would show that the increased speed afforded by Astronomicon-aided warp travel saved more lives than it cost... but only if the Imperium actually provided value to its member worlds, which it plainly does not. Hive worlds have truly vast populations, providing timely humanitarian aid and/or military protection to even one could be worth quite a lot of Astronomicon-days in terms of net human lives. But as long as the Imperium is a complete shit-show that uses its FTL to deliver mass-murder at least as often as food, then yeah, using Tau FTL would be the more ethical move.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:45 pm

The Astronecronomicon is only a stop gap measure employed by Big E to be fair.
He planned to take over the eldar webways for basically instant travel without the warp.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:45 pm

Warp travel on pretty much every level is bad, whether it's done with the aid of Chaos or with the Astronomicon. I'm not entirely certain how secure gellar fields are, but just traipsing through the Warp has the possibility of getting an entire crew possessed by daemons. Not to mention that Warp travel is inherently unstable, and can equal time travel in the right (or wrong) circumstances which can have its own deleterious effects. (As a side note, the people in charge of investigating these effects have up and disappeared.)

However you look at it, Warp travel has a higher net negative effect on the universe than positives, and everyone that uses it is endangering their people.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:55 pm

The Gellar fields are pretty secure. Unless they've been sabotaged or are jumping directly through a warp storm, they'll almost always hold. Mid-transit field failures or time travel are the freak waves of warp travel; they happen and the old NCO tells stories about them when he wants to look unflappable, but they don't stop large-scale trade or military deployments.

Anyways, I'm not sure why people have so much trouble grasping this concept, but Hive Worlds are not self-sufficient. When they lose warp travel, they face mass starvation within months at most.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:47 am

FatR wrote:I pretty much agree with everything you said, but just want to point out Eisenhorn was never a good guy. One of the first things he does in the first book is, IIRC, is rationalizing his refusal to mercy kill a bunch of doomed and horribly suffering people by the pragmatic need to avoid what, as we see soon enough, could have amounted to moderate inconvenience at most.

Eisenhorn was always a hard man, but it wasn't until the second book that he actually starts killing innocent and loyal servants of the Imperium (which he generally glosses over). But really, the defining moment of the series is when he introduces us to Crezia and no one knows who she is.

I know a lot of people don't like Crezia because they prefer the Eisenhorn X Benquin shipping, and think that Abnett just added her out of the blue to give Eisenhorn a love interest. But Crezia's point, I believe, was to show that Eisenhorn had been keeping secrets - from the reader and his own staff - and thus we don't really know the guy who we've been following over the trilogy.

=====

IoM 30k is pretty damn rad.

For all its faults, the Horus Heresy I think did a very good job of inverting this trope and showing that much of the luster of the 30K era may have just been nostalgia as opposed to reality. Sure, it was an age of unification, but it also featured plenty of death and destruction even before Horus went crazy with at least two progressive human empires being obliterated by the Imperium for the "crime" of becoming a Star Trek-like Federation that welcomed Xenos as equals. At least one of these two empires was in fact so progressive that they even managed to define Chaos as a real thing and had girded themselves to combat it.

And really, serious 40K fluff works best as commentaries on human frailty. The whole Horus Heresy mess started because of human frailty - more specifically daddy issues - primarily by "sons" of the Emperor who were treated really badly.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:21 am

Eh, the 30k IoM was way, way less batshit. Horus, talking about the Interex prior to going nuts, actually outright says that their hardline policy towards aliens happened because all the aliens they met early on were complete assholes, and the Interex seemed to be making this interspecies unity thing work and they should reevaluate their policy. Then a Word Bearer goes and steals the chaotic superweapon that they left sitting on a table in a museum totally unguarded and the Interex respond by immediately trying to kill the entire delegation. I don't think they even actually knew it was a Space Marine who did it.

The 30k imperium's primary problem was that some of the Space Marine legions were just totally nuts and even the stable ones had bitter rivalries and the Emperor made basically no effort to deal with that beyond banning Space Marines from using psykers, mainly because the Thousand Sons were having serious problems with turning into Chaos Spawn and shit like that. Which of course seriously pissed Magnus off and gave them so much trouble fighting sorcerers during the Heresy. Meanwhile, when the World Eaters went Khornate it was honestly hard to notice any change.

They were also doing a total atheism, chaos gods are just figments of people's imagination thing in what was apparently a poorly thought out plan to kill them. The Emperor and I think some of the telepathic organizations and Sisters Of Silence actually did know, and they told at least Horus that demons existed and could potentially possess non-psykers under appropriate conditions, but the party line was that everything had some perfectly rational and comprehensible explanation even if they hadn't found one yet and there weren't any gods.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:55 am

If you comb through the 40k literature long enough, you can probably find examples of early Space Marine psykers going demon because grimderp. But it's far more established that the Council of Nikaea had absolutely fuck all to do with chaos corruption among the chapters and everything to do with "chaos sorcerers are scary people and do scary things and are also psykers, and therefore we need to kill all the psykers." The canonical catalyst isn't the increasingly rampant possession of Space Marines by warp daemons. It's that as the space marines expanded further and further from Terra they found themselves bumping into an increasingly large number of chaos cults and chaos sorcerers, which in turn causes a bunch of primarchs to figure out that librarians and chaos sorcerers are using the exact same powers, which in turn causes a bunch of primarchs to freak the fuck out, which in turn gives us the Council of Nikaea.

Like everything else in WH40K, it has less to do with an established, demonstrable threat and more to do with intense paranoia, fear of the "other," and extreme overreaction.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 2:07 am

name_here wrote:Eh, the 30k IoM was way, way less batshit. Horus, talking about the Interex prior to going nuts, actually outright says that their hardline policy towards aliens happened because all the aliens they met early on were complete assholes, and the Interex seemed to be making this interspecies unity thing work and they should reevaluate their policy.

Yet in the meantime other Legions were wiping out human Federations that existed with the xenos; and it's telling that Horus wants to spare the Interex in large part because the Interex was big on Saggittarian symbolism and Horus recalled a story from his dad about how Saggitarrian symbolism was important.

Sure, he goes "why can they contain evil xenos whereas we can only destroy them", but it's telling how his own personal motives of wanting to please daddy was so prominent when he was having a heart-to-heart talk with his best-friend/brother Sanguinius.

Horus in fact, at the end of the novel, essentially "falls" because he couldn't live up to the pressure of making his own decisions and the blames himself when the Interex negotiations blow up (instead of trying to say, find out why the Interex became angry at them). Which then mutates into hating daddy instead of self-hating (it's not my fault! Daddy put too much pressure on me and lied to me!), leading to this whole bloody civil war.

Again, to me, the serious fluff is really all about human frailty; and by extension "Daddy issues". You can make a man into a demi-god, but if you take away his friends (like what happened to Angorn) then it's no surprise that he becomes a crazy war-freak wanting only death and post-rationalizing all his atrocities as merely "doing what it takes to win". It's telling that the single, most stable Primarch in the series (Guilliman) is the one who has both a surrogate father and mother who act like normal people.

the party line was that everything had some perfectly rational and comprehensible explanation even if they hadn't found one yet and there weren't any gods.

That's the party line, but to a large extent it seems that only a specific subset of characters (particularly Loken and the Luna Wolves) actually really buy into this.

An example is how Loken keeps going "Legion fighting against Legion is unthinkable!" in all of the early novels. Yet among the Space Wolves they treat this sort of thinking as some kind of naive joke among themselves and that they consider Legion vs Legion to be not only a possible thing, but a thing that has already happened before. That they may have been the ones to destroy the two "missing" legions demonstrates how things are not necessarily rosy in the 30th Millenium.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 2:32 am

DSMatticus wrote:If you comb through the 40k literature long enough, you can probably find examples of early Space Marine psykers going demon because grimderp. But it's far more established that the Council of Nikaea had absolutely fuck all to do with chaos corruption among the chapters and everything to do with "chaos sorcerers are scary people and do scary things and are also psykers, and therefore we need to kill all the psykers." The canonical catalyst isn't the increasingly rampant possession of Space Marines by warp daemons. It's that as the space marines expanded further and further from Terra they found themselves bumping into an increasingly large number of chaos cults and chaos sorcerers, which in turn causes a bunch of primarchs to figure out that librarians and chaos sorcerers are using the exact same powers, which in turn causes a bunch of primarchs to freak the fuck out, which in turn gives us the Council of Nikaea.

Like everything else in WH40K, it has less to do with an established, demonstrable threat and more to do with intense paranoia, fear of the "other," and extreme overreaction.

It's actually a bit worse than that, since we now have a 40K book covering the actual Council.

There actually was never a growing realization that Chaos Sorcerers = Librarians. Rather, the question revolved around whether or not psykers should be used in combat. Mortarion, Russ, and others believed that psykers were too unstable(very hypocritically in the case of Russ, since his Space Wolves actually continued using psykers after Nikea anyway), while others like Sanguinius and Guilliman believed this was just another tool that can be mastered by training. At the center of all this was the Thousand Sons, because the legion was practically all-psyker as was their homeworld (this was a world where psyker powers were used so casually that waiters at cafes used psyker mind-reading to take orders)

Nikea was therefore an argument not merely about Librarians, but of psykers as a whole, with the Thousand Sons correctly pointing out that without psykers interstellar travel and commerce wouldn't even be possible. But then the Emperor suddenly swoops in, ignores most of the deliberations, and says all Librarian contingents must disband no questions asked.

Ironically, the Thousand Sons actually proved loyal and tried to warn the Emperor of Horus' treachery... only for the Emperor to completely ignore the warning and be royally pissed at the Thousand Sons instead for violating his orders not to use Psyker powers. It's kinda like a parent getting angry at a child for using the telephone to call 911 and resolve a real emergency, because the parent believed that telephones shouldnt be put in the hands of children. And this is a parent who believed any transgression should be punished with the words "Purge" and "Genocide".

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 3:12 am

Apparently some of what was up with the Librarian thing was a Tzeentchian daemon impersonated the leader of the Thousand Sons spy corps and proceeded to launch an assassination attempt on someone who might have been a Thousand Sons brainwashed spy in the Space Wolves. Right in the middle of the meeting about psyker use prompted by concerns about the Thousand Sons.

Then when Magnus proceeded to royally fuck up and tear a hole in the Imperial Webway, leaving an un-closeable warp portal onto Terra and determining that it would be very hard to convince the Emperor that his favorite son had turned traitor right after doing that, the Emperor sent the Space Wolves to arrest them. Then Horus called up Leman Russ and told him that there'd been a change of plans and he should kill the Thousand Sons instead, because this was after he'd recovered from being stabbed with the knife stolen from the Interex.

Incidentally, on the Sagittarius influence thing, Horus was joking. After he said that, everyone laughed and then asked him what the real reason was.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:36 am

name_here wrote: Then when Magnus proceeded to royally fuck up and tear a hole in the Imperial Webway, leaving an un-closeable warp portal onto Terra and determining that it would be very hard to convince the Emperor that his favorite son had turned traitor right after doing that, the Emperor sent the Space Wolves to arrest them. Then Horus called up Leman Russ and told him that there'd been a change of plans and he should kill the Thousand Sons instead, because this was after he'd recovered from being stabbed with the knife stolen from the Interex.

It says a lot about the IoM at 30K when Lemon Russ doesn't bat an eye when the orders to arrest his own brother are changed to murderizing his own brother along everybody else at his planet. He's completely fine with that and doesn't pause a moment to double check with daddy if there weren't any communication problems in that last part.

Then there's also this other discussion:
Lorgar: Hey, did you guys know we can make planets join us just by using diplomacy without need of any murderizing?
Emprah: HOW DARE YOU CONQUER PLANETS WITHOUT USING VIOLENCE? I'M GONNA BLOW UP YOUR FAVORITE CITY AS PUNISHMENT! NOW PICK UP YOUR CHAINSWORD AND GO KILL INNOCENTS UNTIL I TELL YOU TO STOP!

So yeah, no wonder even the orks admired the emprah. He had no concept of peace.

name_here wrote: Anyways, I'm not sure why people have so much trouble grasping this concept, but Hive Worlds are not self-sufficient. When they lose warp travel, they face mass starvation within months at most.

Protip:don't colonize worlds in a way they'll never be self-sufficient.

Plus, the IoM is constantly blowing up their own self-sufficient planets, so again proof they do it just to meet their daily quota of suffering.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:42 am

Err . . no . .
Lorgar specifically used religion and belief to hold sway over planets . .
Something the Emperor expressly had forbidden years ago. That's why Monarchia was levelled.

Ironically, the religion LORGAR the first Heretic(no, not Erebus, not Horus) created way back when is now the mandated state religion of the IoM.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:48 am

You just said what I said with different words. Lorgar developed an efficient and non-violent method of getting planets to join the IoM, and the Emprah replied "No, KILLMAIMBURN is the only true way."

Plus, notice how the Emprah "punishes" his sons by murderizing the people they liked by the millions. Worst daddy ever? Worst daddy ever.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:28 am

maglag wrote:You just said what I said with different words.

No, he said something that was different in a small but critical way. The reason the Emprah razed the planet is not because it had been peacefully converted instead of taken by force, but because he had a zero tolerance policy for any kind of religious worship. That's not exactly kind-hearted in itself, but you're being completely dishonest when you claim "this planet must be razed because of what the people are doing" is the same as "this planet must be razed because there must always be more violence."

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:25 pm

The only good 40k lore is in codices, the novels are all shit.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:08 pm

Chamomile wrote:
maglag wrote:You just said what I said with different words.
No, he said something that was different in a small but critical way. The reason the Emprah razed the planet is not because it had been peacefully converted instead of taken by force, but because he had a zero tolerance policy for any kind of religious worship. That's not exactly kind-hearted in itself, but you're being completely dishonest when you claim "this planet must be razed because of what the people are doing" is the same as "this planet must be razed because there must always be more violence."

Considering that what the people of that planet were doing was 100% because of what the emprah-appointed envoy had told them to do, that's a falsehood.

If they had refused to follow Lorgar's words, there would've been KILLMAIMBURN.

But since they accepted to follow Lorgar's words... There was also KILLMAIMBURN.

All paths offered by the emprah lead to KILLMAIMBURN.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:21 pm

maglag wrote:
Chamomile wrote:
maglag wrote:You just said what I said with different words.
No, he said something that was different in a small but critical way. The reason the Emprah razed the planet is not because it had been peacefully converted instead of taken by force, but because he had a zero tolerance policy for any kind of religious worship. That's not exactly kind-hearted in itself, but you're being completely dishonest when you claim "this planet must be razed because of what the people are doing" is the same as "this planet must be razed because there must always be more violence."
Considering that what the people of that planet were doing was 100% because of what the emprah-appointed envoy had told them to do, that's a falsehood.

If they had refused to follow Lorgar's words, there would've been KILLMAIMBURN.

But since they accepted to follow Lorgar's words... There was also KILLMAIMBURN.

All paths offered by the emprah lead to KILLMAIMBURN.

The emperor would have been perfectly cool with an atheist democracy willingly joining the Imperium without any sort of violence. The issue is that the planet wasn't athiest. And switching from one form of theism to another doesn't cut it. Logar was misguided because he was raised in on an extremely religious world and integrated the Emperor in his own theology, but his theology was wrong.