“Guilliman was afforded the place of honour. A massive bronze chair had been taken from the museum vaults deep under the Fortress of Hera and brought forth for his use. Though Calgar had seen the primarch in stasis and was thus aware of how physically large he was, the primarch’s artefacts had always seemed bigger somehow than the being they were made for, as if sized for a titan from a greater age. They were sacred relics all, revered by successive generations of Ultramarines. The Ultramarines did not pray to their primarch, nor venerate him in an overtly religious way. They did not believe either the Emperor or His son divine, but an aura of holiness clung to his effects nonetheless, and it had been the habit of many Chapter Masters to meditate in the museum vaults, looking for inspiration from the things that had known the touch of their gene-sire.

To the primarch, the throne was just another piece of furniture, a possession reclaimed, as Ultramar was. He used it unthinkingly. Even now he was back, his casual attitude toward these ancient relics, although they were his, offended something in Calgar.

It was a ridiculous notion.”–Dark Imperium

“The more serene the priest on the outside, the deeper his faith was on the inside, and the deeper the faith, the hotter the righteous fires he might cast you into. There was a balance of humours Guilliman required. His militant-apostolic needed some of that zeal.

But be careful there is not too much fire, Roboute, he chided himself, or you will be burnt yourself.”–Dark Imperium

“That’s a sharp outfit, Chan. Careful, you could puncture the hull of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea. Because… it’s so sharp.”

“Mathieu approached confidently, without outward signs of pious joy at being so close to a son of the Emperor. He did not quake or sing, or burst into tears. He was not afraid. He smiled instead, with an edge of sly humour Guilliman instantly liked. It was a smile that acknowledged the uncomfortableness of the situation, and the un­even power dynamic. It was a smile that said its wearer understood those things, and found them amusing.”–Dark Imperium

“Thiel gazed back, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the face of his gene-sire. Thiel was a good warrior, tested in battle many times, unafraid to voice his mind and modest enough to hide the love he had for his lord, but it shone in his face like a light.”–Dark Imperium

BL mentions language barriers rarely and inconsistently, but my headcanon is that the Heresy-era High Gothic that Guilliman speaks and the 40k-era Low Gothic dialect everyone’s speaking in Ultramar are as mutually incomprehensible to each other as early Roman Latin from late medieval French. So the only person who can communicate fluently with Guilliman the first few hours after they wake him up is Celestine, who knows extensive Ecclesiarchal High Gothic as part of her very good religious education and devotions. Most other people only know a spattering of words–and certainly not conjugation–and mostly say their prayers in the modern language or mumble them by route. Even she, as far as Guilliman is concerned, talks really weird compared to how the language was used in his day–religious references aside–but at least she’s understandable. By the end of the first day, he’s fluent in the modern language so it’s a moot point, but for those first few hours it makes everything harder, yet somehow easier to break things to him piece by piece.

The corrupting nature of Chaos is a central conceit of 40k, but I get frustrated sometimes about the whole class of stories you can’t tell as a result.

The Imperium’s whole purity obsession is a natural outgrowth of this. Once someone has touched Chaos, they are evil forever. While we occasionally get protagonists falsely accused of some wrongdoing involving Chaos who must then clear their names (or characters persecuted for being in the vicinity of Chaos in case they had been corrupted), that does not change the originally assertion. If someone had been snatched by Chaos in the few minutes they were in the general vicinity of something Chaos-y happening, they could have been corrupted by Chaos cooties. You might have no way of telling, because they could hide their new infection by Chaos magic. It wouldn’t matter, had this happened, what their previous personality was, because it would have been replaced with a brand new Chaos personality ™ that is looking for the first opportunity your back is turned to burn down the entire hive. And if this had happened, you couldn’t do anything about the problem except killing them, because they are corrupted forever. This is an entirely plausible scenario that has happened many times in canon, so the Imperium’s over-responses do make some degree of sense.

Imperial narrators have the self-righteous self-assurance of people who have never been tempted, because being tempted in the first place would involve too much contact with Chaos. There’s the occasional scene of someone being offered ULTIMATE POWER by a villain, which rarely comes across as particularly tempting, believable even if you didn’t know better, or playing to any tragic flaw or worldly desire of the character. (Not that most characters have enough personality to fill a teaspoon in the first place.)

On the Chaos side, this leads to the angsty protagonists who keep going on about disliking Chaos without ever doing anything about their situation in life. (In between characters who are 100% pro-Chaos and think life is great, characters who turned to Chaos twenty minutes ago and received complete personality transplants and are ready to kick puppies and eat babies now, and characters who’d been behaving like that long before their official fall to Chaos, because the Imperium has no standards whatsoever, so see no particular change to their lifestyle other than shouting different slogans.) Non-Chaos to Chaos is a one-way street.

What all of this precludes is people making conscious choices out of moral fortitude or personal responsibility based on experience. Chaos uses the word change a lot, but actually allows for very limited options for becoming a more powerful warlord or descending the other way into spawnhood or death. There’s no space for redemption arcs. There’s no space for people just fucking off to find something else to do with their lives than being Chaos Space Marine #3. It’s supposed to be a big galaxy and every once in a while there’s a one line mention in a Chaos book of a Marine in a nontraditional role somewhere off-screen, but what we get is the same warband leader protagonist again and again.

It’s also based on this weird idea that really people are awful at heart and if only their restraint and repression were stripped away, they would be terrible to each other and pick the dark side option in their decisions 100% of the time. Considering how many people I know to play light side characters in video games specifically designed to let you indulge those desires, because pixels being sad makes them sad, I’m not super convinced. People doing what they want to deep down without anything to hold them back would be far more varied than that. Yeah, sure, there are plenty of things I can imagine myself doing if I didn’t have morality, restraint, or other priorities, but I would also adopt all the cats from the animal shelter and live with them and be friends with my friends. Attempts to write “universal truths about human nature” often fall flat, like this one Chaos books try to pull so often, because bizarrely many of the thousands of humans I have personally met in my life did not have the same nature.

Even among people who are nasty, the idea that they are 100% and 0% good in all ways, desires, actions, and relationships in pretty dumb. There are so many characters who dismiss everything I consider important as “human weakness,” whose priorities I consider worthless trash right back–clearly there are more options for what people want or care about than gets shown.

Or even more threeway wars between groups operating at angles to each other rather than direct us vs. them, which leads to more characters with varying goals and motivations. Or people doing good things for bad or self-serving reasons or enlightened self-interest, like in a Ciaphas Cain story.

Anyway, what I’m saying is I’d be interested in reading more of different sorts of Chaos Marines or other people with Chaos corruption in their history who fall outside the same two or three templates making up 90% Chaos faction characters in the franchise.

“‘Calth burned, yet our brother lives. Roboute. Wise Roboute. Roboute with his scratching quills, his plans and his hope. Too understanding, too strong. Too damned perfect.’ Horus let out a long breath, and turned back to his empty throne. ‘I wish he was with us.’”–Warmaster

#just suck his dick already jeez

“Thiel bows his head, but quickly raises it again. He does not wish to wallow long in contrition.

‘I saw what was necessary and acted.’

Guilliman tries but cannot fully mask the admiration he feels at his sergeant’s temerity. It is what makes Thiel such a singular warrior.”–Strategem