Skimming through Master of Mankind, I find myself struck by the hole the BL authors have written themselves into. We are told over and over, for the sake of epicness and scale, how superlative and amazing and wise and powerful people are. This series puts a serious investment into its purple prose depictions of primarchs, the Emperor, etc. But this is a prequel series for a grimdark setting. So, inherent to that, what we are shown is them fucking up, them losing, them being utter morons.
(Perhaps in the hands of a really, really good author it could come across as really great people doing everything right and still failing because what they’re up against is just that much better, but BL is rarely that good.)
One line I liked was something about how the greatest sin is failure. Do or do not, there is no try. The problem with that comment, in context, is that this is the Emperor speaking and the Emperor fails. You have done fucked up. That overshadows every attempt to make the Emperor seem cool or all powerful or all knowing or whatever. He fails. Extremely. Fails. That is the ultimate come-back to every other line in the book about “did X because I had to, it was necessary”, “doing Y was the most efficient.” You failed. You did not, in fact, succeed.
Which leaves two possibilities. One: What was attempted was inherently impossible. The Great Plan has been vaguely alluded to in canon at various points before this, but this book sure did not sell it (those few bits I skimmed). Yes, freeing humanity from the predations of the Warp seems like a good idea, as a general statement. Could it be done? Much more questionable. I am the origin of or contributor to some pretty weird and out-there AUs, and the greatest compliment I ever receive is “yet somehow you make it work.” I can’t make this work. My imagination will not produce an AU where the Emperor succeeds at such a plan as stated.
The Emperor’s plan in particular revolves around the removal of religion and superstition. But does the Imperial Truth accomplish this? Not really. It removes specific information which would have benefited people when confronted with actual literal daemons they need to fight, but does it change human nature? Because that’s the thing: the Emperor’s plan reads like something developed by someone who’s never met an actual human. People just find a new rebranding of the same old sentiments, we see over and over again in this series, in their devotion to their military hierarchies and leaders, to the Emperor, to “science” (and read that as “science in quotation marks”). Not only is there no sign human nature has changed, it is a weak, brittle thing, and within a few centuries the Imperium has become a straight-up theocracy.
In this case, the Emperor wasted a lot of people’s time, and everyone would have been better off if he had come up with a plan to minimize damage from the inevitable fallout rather than try to get the perfect ending.
The second interpretation of the whole thing is that the Emperor is personally incompetent. It’s hard to maintain an IC/OOC divide in discussing this, because OOC concerns of the authors and the series so inform the characters that are written. As a literary device, the Emperor exists throughout the series to make very brief cameos and very monumental decisions that throws the current plot into complete disarray. But for the dramatic tensions of that current book to be maintained as it goes into the second act, these decisions have to be very detrimental ones that fuck up the narrators’ lives (ex. Ullanor, Nikaea). So, we’re told the Emperor is really great, but every specific decision he’s made in the series itself has had a dozen major negative consequences that entire books have been spent making up for. If the Emperor ever showed up and fixed everything with no downsides, then it would be a really boring book, I agree. The problem is, because it’s the former that’s used over and over, we never see the Emperor actually succeed at anything important or make a good decision.
The assertion that the Emperor only sees the primarchs as weapons, not children, is hardly a new theory in the series and certainly fits the evidence. But… that doesn’t make it a good plan. And, as we all knew going in, making a bunch of perfectly good planet-destroyers, then making them believe they’re people and giving them anxiety, leads to civil war across the galaxy, the destruction of the human Webway, the Emperor’s own death, and ten thousand years of nonsense.
Again, the argument that cuts through every assertion that the Emperor chose to be an asshole to this particular person or make this particular assholish policy or do this particular atrocity is that he stilled failed. Every decision in the series that seems really stupid and obviously doomed to screw everything up, and then does, in fact, have exactly the negative consequences you’d expect–but it was necessary (we are told, because the series loves to be grimdark and edgy and morally gray). Still fails. He doesn’t win. From which you can only conclude, that if the Emperor had, perhaps, not been terrible to every person he met, he might not have failed. Or if he’d still failed, well, we wouldn’t be any worse off, now would we? So all those justifications are completely worthless and he is just a bad person as well as a failure.
It feeds back into itself–because he did not value individuals, because he did not keep faith with those who called him father and return their love, because he shows no sign of understanding human nature, because he treated everyone and everything around him as replacable, because he rid himself of all those things in order to be this Master of Mankind he has decided is necessary–he fails. Those decisions and values and ways of thinking are what directly cause his failure; they are not incidental.
But, yeah, sure book series. Tell me how great these people are. Pretend I’m impressed.
because by fate even the gods are cast down 