Rereading Know No Fear reminds me that Aeonid Thiel is genuinely my favorite character in the HH series, probably my favorite in the franchise outside of the Ciaphas Cain series.

Here is a Space Marine who’s defining personality characteristic is not “he is a douchebag.” In a series where that’s 90% of the characterization going around. In characters we’re told are particularly douchebags. In characters we’re told are comparatively nice, no they’re also douchebags. These are very unpleasant people who are shitty to read about and I am merely going along in hopes of seeing them die. Then there are the non-Astartes characters who only exist to be constantly insulted by the narrative as weak and stupid and petty, by dint of not being Space Marines.

Then there’s this dude, who seems casually decent. He immediately teams up with and leads everyone on hand when shit goes down, seems to be genuinely friendly and concerned with others, here and in the audiodrama. No one ever makes a big deal about it in so many words, but he seems nice.

He gets bored. He constantly puts his foot in his mouth and makes decisions to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, when he even notices that someone might object to what he’s doing before he does it. He is a total trainwreck of a person.

In a series where it loves to use the line “A normal human would have gotten tired of this by now, but Space Marines could do this indefinitely” or “A normal human would have felt like this, but these were Space Marines who were 2000% better so they didn’t.” Which is really bad writing, the more I think about it, and is the reason Space Marines sound like such faker idiots—It makes it sound like they’re obviously feeling the emotion in question, but then quickly and unconvincingly denying it. Or a momentary mishap is attributed to primarch awe, in order to make the non-POV primarch character seem cooler. Then there’s Thiel, and it’s very clear, no that’s just him, no excuses.

He’s such a bad Ultramarine, that’s the source of a lot of his problems, yet… He is an Ultramarine. He’s that edge of the Gaussian curve reckless Ultramarine. Guilliman likes him. Gage’s first impression of him is that he is incredibly competent and does exactly what needs done, he just manages to walk all over propriety and procedure and other people’s toes in the process. Maybe he’s have been a better Luna Wolf, some friend of Torgaddon’s, but also really fleshes out “what it means to be an Ultramarine” and this book’s whole characterization of what Guilliman’s really like, not the things other people think about him in other books or in the 40k-era.

I just really like him, okay?