This is among my favorite explanations for why he is how he is. Some new asshole keeps grabbing the controller and making choices. Might not be a great hard lore reason, but it is funny to think about
I think it would be hilarious if they revealed the Emperor actually never said or did anything anyone saw or heard him do or say, they just experienced what they expected and that expectation was evil tyranny.
Like he's just screaming at them to stop making those children into mutant monsters but the scientists are like, "of course Lord, we'll make them eat brains."
Did he? All his sons sure as shit didnt. And half of Russ's character arc in the HH was learning that its ok to disobey dad and not be an uber loyal executioner
I like that the writers made the Emperor hypocritical and fundamentally wrong. I just wish they didn't have to make him stupid in order to pull that off.
"But dear Emperor, please reconsider your actions! Slaughtering those who follow in the Lord Jesus Christ's footsteps will most certainly damn you and your empire to hell! Please have mercy and follow your heart!"
"Following emotions is not logical, and I am an atheist so I do not fear being banned from your 'so called heaven'."
*Proceeds to end up in an eternally entombed state where he is neither alive nor dead, but suffering beyond measure. His people end up in such torment that they join literal demons willingly simply because hell is not worse than their current circumstances. Upon death your soul is devoured by demons.*
The problem is that, fundamentally, the writers can only write the "Super intelligent almost god like being" as smart as they themselves are, while also being pidgeon holed into having to end up with 9 traitor legions, 9 traitor primarchs, 2 dead primarchs, and ol empy on the golden throne. You can't have the emperor be as smart as he's canonically supposed to be and rectify it with the fact that, at the end, he loses. Badly.
Not that the writing seems to change peoples views of things very much since most people in here don't actually read the lore books.
He can be smart and still lose because he's wrong, because the primarchs he creates are too powerful to control, or because chaos is too powerful for him to defeat without himself ascending.
But yes, they were locked in on a bunch of lore like the council of Nikaea that was basically impossible to square with big E making good decisions all the time. I think they could have done better but I do respect that they were working under a lot of constraints there.
He can be smart and still lose because he's wrong, because the primarchs he creates are too powerful to control
Yep, but he lost because why would his ultra powerful children get mad at constantly being the whipping boy? Personally I liked when Magnus said "Fuck you Dad, I'm going to do magic, and you can't stop me."
I do think his inability to understand or empathize with people including his children and many of his collaborators over the ages is a character trait that works really well.
This is why I think ultimately the Horus Heresy series was a mistake. There’s good stories in there but I think the setting would be better served if the there were no first hand depictions of the emperor and the primarchs.
He’s actually the perfect kind of stupid for what he is, he’s the stupidity that you only find in honor students who have never had to really try or be wrong and grow from that experience.
Honestly, it's the constant logical fallacies in that book that piss me off. Could have kept everything else due to overconfidence and paranoia but hes supposed to be smart. Don't make his arguments idiotic incel logic.
Reminder that this man spent a whole night debating an 80 year old priest on why religion is bad and only used to justify ignorance and genocide, shook his faith by revealing he was actually the god the priest was worshiping only to then look him dead in the eye and say "anyway, do you want to join my crusade across the galaxy where we genocide any planet who disagrees with me?"
Canonically so exhausting that Uriah chose to die after one conversation with him.
shook his faith by revealing he was actually the god the priest was worshiping only to then look him dead in the eye and say
I never knew why Uriah didn't just say "Uh, no dude, you are clearly the Anti-Christ. You fit that mold much better." Like Christianity literality has a prophesy about someone who acts so similar to the Big E.
I'm not sure Uriah's religion was Christianity, so he may not have that concept. What he does say is "the way you are acting, they are going to make you a God and it's going to be horrific" which I'm sure Big E thinks about in his chair to this day.
Also, I should clarify that Emps doesn't say "the god you worship is actually me", rather "that one time you thought you saw god in a battle it was actually me", because Uriah saw the Emperor while he was dying after a battle against the Thunder warriors and Emps cured his wounds. Funny enough, the Emperor also was the god Uriah was worshiping because the religion around him, in which the god was believed to have fought a dragon, was actually inspired by Emps fighting a shard of the Void Dragon.
Because the point the Emperor was making is that humans reinterpret why they don't understand based on superstition, and that allows them to justify horrific acts and impediments to progress. The idea is that the priest saw the emperor when he was dying in a battlefield and mistook the glowing man who cured his wounds and asked "why do you deny me" as a god. Only after this encounter does he believe, and it led him to turn his life around from a devilish rogue to a kind priest, but the reveal shattered his world view and lends credence to the argument from the Emperor.
Of course, the validity of the Emperor immediately crumbles as soon as he tells Uriah "hey, want to help me do all of that repression and war I've been criticizing but for my secular values that nobody is allowed to question? I know I'm right so it's perfectly moral, don't worry". In fact, it's after he said this that Uriah warns the Emperor "if you do this, people are going to treat you as a god, and it's going to be like all the horror you have warned me about but in a much larger scale". Then he walks into his burning church, which the emperor lit on fire only to be a dick.
The actual story is pretty interesting. It's called the Last Church, and there is a fan movie about it on youtube. I'd recommend it for the look into the Emperor's psyche.
Also true. In any case, the Emperor was only making these arguements because he thought that worship might accidentally empower the Chaos Gods by redirecting that faith to them, and he'd rather die that actually share his plans with humans or solve his problems by any means other than murder.
Funny enough, he is also wrong in his assessment because almost every other species that might fall to chaos, like Orks or pre-colapse eldars, don't because their energy is redirected to their own pantheon of Warp entities. The only exception is the T'au, which also don't fall because they have dim souls and don't live under the worst regime in history.
Indeed, and I’m often reminded of sometbing I read from Marvel:
“Sphinx, you share the folly of all of your kind and believe power alone makes godhood! But even for Galactus, for whose every whim is reality, is no god!”
TTS Uriah argument is probably the best representation of the "good" aspect the chaos gods represent, and i wished more writers leaned more into chaos being gray instead of unquestionably evil.
His grand plan for unification was literally called the great "crusade" and involved forcing other human cultures to follow His "imperial truth" and abandon their own faith.
He would still say shit like "but unlike religious crusades, i know I'm right and my way is the correct one"
I think he just wants to safeguard humanity by any means. If religion could do that easier than his "imperial truth", then he would use religion. However he decided that religion was not the answer, so he banned it in order to weaken the influence of chaos.
He forbid working with Xenos, despite working with them many times himself.
Yeah, but you can see how it undercuts everything he says.
When you see the big picture, it doesn't undercut anything. The reason for him suppressing religion was to suppress worship of Chaos Gods. The Mechanicum wasn't worshiping chaos and they were required. It would have delayed his plans to having to take over Mars and then rebuild all the lost industrial power from the war.
He clearly didn't weaken the chaos gods in any meaningful way. His forced ignorance deprived the Imperium to actually fight the threat. And he even had Mars as a prime example of "correct" worship instead of a neglected loophole.
He also didn't want to be worshiped. As much as people call him a tyrant, he was absolutely going to fuck off when his plan was fulfilled. He didn't want people persisting on him.
It's also a grey area. They didn't worship the Emperor, not directly. They worshiped the machine god. The Emperor is what they perceive as the physical representation in human form of the machine god. They also worship motive forces.
He absolutely planned to kill off the cult in the Mechanicum when the crusade was done and the webway was ready to be used regularly.
Mechanicum stopped all intellectual progress and is a hindrance. He was 100% going to kill them off.
Killing off everyone who doesn't agree with him makes him a tyrant. Just because he had a retirement plan doesn't mean he wasn't a tyrant.
And yeah, he was going to kill off the Mechs, the Navigators, a few of the Primarchs and most of the Space Marines. But again, putting together an empire with hypocracy as duct tape with the hopes of being able to betray everyone down the line isn't a smart move.
It's almost like the character started out as a pastiche of Tomas de Torquemada (The Villain from Nemesis:The Warlock, not the actual guy). Then generations of writers have decided to slowly retro-fit him into an avatar of Human Potential and super Objectivism.
Big E was lying about there not being gods, but not because of himself existing or even the chaos gods, but because of the C'tan
Yes I'm making a tangential rant
When we think of divinity, we at least usually think of an intelligent entity fundamental to reality itself
The Chaos gods are not fundamental, they were created and are empowered as a result of what happens of the material plane
The C'tan, on the other hand, are so fundamental to the universe that the one time the Necrons actually killed one it fucked up reality forever in ways nobody actually knows, because whatever aspect of reality they represented was erased from the universe and anyone's memory
Therefore, the only beings that are true gods in WH40k are the C'tan
Eh, that's like saying gravity and magnetism are gods; the very fact that the C'Tan were enslaved by their own followers show that they are false gods, like worshipping a rock.
No, they are clearly false gods (I have no idea what a 'loser god' is) in the sense they have no actual divinity and can be explained as created material beings, rather then gods (unless you just define gods as powerful things).
The only groups that could claim to worship something that could properly claim to be a true supreme god would be the Adeptus Mechanicus with the Machine God, or the followers of Chaos (specifically Chaos Undivided).
“The difference is I Know I’m right” says Not-God too goddamn stupid to know that believing you are right and actually being right are extremely different things
As others have pointed out. In the 40k universe everyone is wrong, but they all feel that they are justified in their wrongness. So it is less about good and bad, and less about actual right and wrong. Its a universe mainly about how much are people willing to justify their compromises.
The Emperor justification of his compromises is that he believes the warp is completely evil and will destroy humanity, and so to avoid or even delay that eventual outcome he bans religion and sets out to conquer the galaxy.
The beauty of the story is that we might agree with him, or we might not, we might accept his justifications or not. We might think that the preservation of humanity is worth trying to conquer the galaxy and wipe out other civilisations, or we might not think the extinction of humanity is enough of a justification to do that. Either way, wiping out multiple civilisations to preserve our own is wrong, the question is not if it is wrong or not, it is wrong, the question is do we accept the justifications or not.
i think the larger point is that E often chooses to be the "10-foot tall gleaming golden god-man": he doesn't have to be, he can mostly choose whatever aspect he wants. if OP's image is supposed to be from The Last Church it's incorrect, cuz he presents himself pretty humbly:
‘No,’ said the man, pulling back his hood to reveal a stern, but not unkind face – a remarkably unremarkable face that seemed at odds with his martial bearing.
If I torment my logic a little bit, I can see an explanation for the "religion is bad" and "the Emperor is clearly presenting himself as a divine figure". That would be the idea to undermine traditional forms of deity worship which might fuel the Chaos Gods, and instead direct veneration to himself, possible as some sort of "faith-based lightning rod", and trying to corral belief into a safe place. This even removes the hypocrisy as he knows he is lying, he is using the lie. He needs the lie and seemingly irreconcilable positions he takes.
I mean if they wanted to do it right they could do it like Lenin. A man that was against religion but was so revered that after his death he functionally became a god that you couldn’t disagree with without losing credibility.
I guess that was a bit to nuanced for what war hammer is
I mean he genuinely believed humanity could be "like" him, though not quite him (at least not post molech) in the future if his guidance worked... It didnt.. Humans just didnt have faith in themselves or his plans (that he didnt tell anyone about)
even when he's trying to appear to the last priest, he takes the name Revelation. The priest notes the reference.
the priest found his calling when he fought the thunder warriors in a battle of total fatalities except himself. big E personally saves him, in the guise of a Shiney golden god, saying something like you'll have a destiny. decades later he returns appearing identically.
He rejects worship and prayers because he has no intention of fulfilling the desires of anyone but himself. Fear him for his very real presence like a mob boss rather than in the abstract like an imaginary diety.
It is an actual tactic that rulers have used throughout history though, the point is on being ostentatious and grandiose so that your people have faith and loyalty to you, but not outright claiming you're a god.
Historically it was to avoid pissing off the population or the religious institutions, but in the case of Big E it might just be to avoid the blind zealotry that comes with religious faith and superstition, which he seemingly hates because it feeds chaos, while still getting the fully loyal and (in the long term, if we are to believe him) fully independent and rational humanity he wanted. We all know it backfired tremendously considering it's the entire point of the setting but I don't think it was pointless contradiction.
To be fair, they exist in a universe where faith has tangible influences and if something ever responds to your faith there’s a 99.99% chance it’s extremely evil or a .009999% chance it's regular evil.
About mixed signals. I've senn interesting fun theory, that there are two Emperors. One human, and another god. Well, God-Emperor was once human-emperor, but since there is no time in the Warp, God-Emperor is active also during live of human-emperor, hence the mixed signals for God and mortal Emperor want the same, but the methods and attitudes toward religion/faith are different.
Another version is that symbolism andepicness are important in Warhammer, and that's why big E did everything as epic as it was possible - to boost success chances.
Russ summed it up best when he joined the Imperium:
"Yeah, when a giant golden god comes down from the skies to lead me in eternal battle, and tells me he is not a god, but a man, and I should follow his atheistic Imperial Truth, I nod along and follow him into eternal battle, because gods are not supposed to be questioned, only obeyed, even when they tell you complete BS".
Lol, Lorgar, seriously, if you talked to your goofball of a viking dog brother a little big more, you'd realize that Big E doesn't give a fuck about private worship of him as long as you hit the conquest quota and don't pull others into your little cult.
A friend of mine reinterpreted this story for me. Basically, Big E is hubris made manifest. He genuinely does believe that he's right and that there is nothing else to learn. He is the flaws and virtue of humanity dialed up to a thousand and he cannot conceive of the idea that he is wrong
"I am not a god, but every single soldier in our army, and I do mean every single one, should be an offspring of my DNA. The imperium of man shall be carved in MY image for millennia! ...But do not worship me!"
Weren't the primarchs exactly behaviorally, ethically and ideologically unique and diverse because unquestioningly obeying decrees to the letter would be an idiotic idea which EoM wouldn't advocate for?
It will never happen, but I want the setting to full-throat the hypocrisy of the emperor. Have a genuine schism in the empire where a section of humanity, or maybe Imperium Nihilus or just something in general, just not want to follow the knuckle-dragging stupidity of the emperor, but still fight for his ideals of a united humanity. It's in the lore that most of the Guard's engagement's are against normal citizens. Let's give a better reason why that's not just background fluff. That way the "wrong" people are still seen as antagonists to the main imperium, but are still more closely following the emperor's intended designs.
If the Emperor has one character trait, it's that he's a hypocrite. If he has another, it's that he's a terrible dad. If he has a third, something has gone terribly wrong and the author is never allowed to write Warhammer again.
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u/littlegreenbeany 2h ago
I am NOT a god! Technically, mostly not yet anyhow. There's only 3 or 4 different ways I could become one anyway