because by fate even the gods are cast down

nighthaunting:

the post has gotten really long and i honestly don’t want that novel excerpt on my blog, but i agree @flunkyofmalcador ADB has been good in the past in the areas that he’s good at, but the work he’s done for the emperor (and to some extent horus as well) has been honestly so tiring?

the emperor having zero redeeming qualities removes a lot of the emotional nuance from the heresy, just like horus having always “secretly been bad” removes the emotional nuance of his fall.

i can completely believe that the emperor created the primarchs for certain purposes, and became more pragmatic about them as time went on, but to flat out claim he didn’t care for them at all and is incapable of human emotions? seems so reductive, honestly?? the emperor might be some flavor of divinity or posthuman, but his whole deal is that he’s human, writ large. in the operatic sense of WH, his humanity is largely his undoing because obviously he and horus had an emotional basis for their relationship that was powerful enough to drive horus into enough doubt as to be susceptible to corruption when he felt that the emperor was withdrawing from it.

multiple times in books not written by ADB the emperor has been believably written to be focused on his larger goals and determined to achieve them without sacrificing literally everything about the emperor that makes him engaging as a character?? and speaking generally, its one of the larger plot points of the setting that the emperor found most of the primarchs when they were adults, and thus his relationships with them are different than children who were raised from infancy by a parent??

where is the great tragedy of the heresy, the fall of the imperium into decay and the emperor into his living death, if on one side of the battle we had horus lupercal who was never actually the paragon he was touted as and on the other we had an emperor of mankind who cared nothing for humanity other than a means to an end?? and why even bother establishing the emperor’s many projects as being ‘for the future good of mankind’ if really everything is just vanity and vainglory and tools to be disposed of when they’re no longer useful?

Pretty much exactly going through my head as well lately. If the Emperor has no redeeming qualities, then the entire story can be reduced to “Douchebag gets what’s coming to him, rest of humanity screwed along the way”, which just sounds like an Onion headline.

There’s a lot of throwing around “What if the Imperium was just as evil as Chaos?!” and sure, they are not and never were good, but that’s different from making them be evil just for the sake of dickery, at the expense of strategy, coherency, or competence. Part of the original point of the series was “they were so close, they almost made it, if not for this one tragic flaw…” While as time goes on you get more the impression from the series that no one, especially the Emperor, did a single, solitary thing right at any point, and you’d have to be delusional to think any policy therein had a snowball’s chance in hell of ending well, and it subsequently does not end well.

Plus, as you said, emotional impact. If someone gets betrayed by an acquintance they don’t care about, that’s an inconvenience. The thing that makes the Heresy devastating, makes it heart-wrenching, is how much people loved each other and all the wonderful things they’d done together before and yet they ended up on different sides. A character who thinks of themselves as being inconvenienced by a mechanical malfunction is not interesting. Characters who hated each other and were jerks to each other from their first meeting but didn’t try to actively kill each other until later also don’t have that impact.

It’s like there are two opposing camps in BL: those who declare “this character is my precious baby who did nothing wrong, he was just forced into it by having a bad childhood” and those who say “this character is evil and was born evil and kicked puppies as a baby.” Neither faction are good writers, in my opinion. The first tend to completely sidestep any moral dilemmas they create, write apologia that really doesn’t excuse the bad shit they have their characters freely choosing to do, and make whoever’s the designated antagonist of the story act terrible just to make their character look good. The second, okay, they’re just evil? So what? Why do I care about them or their fall in the slightest? They don’t even seem to be enjoying themselves being evil, while also having no other motivation or goals.

Anyway, yeah, while every once in a while I’ll enjoy a new thing GW puts out, most of it is really, really bad and I have no idea why increasingly making that particular interpretation canon seemed like a good idea to go with.