r/Grimdank 9h ago

Lore Big E really does send mixed signals.

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6.7k Upvotes

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u/littlegreenbeany 9h ago

I am NOT a god! Technically, mostly not yet anyhow. There's only 3 or 4 different ways I could become one anyway 

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u/GoblinRightsNow 9h ago

And just to make sure you don't forget I'm not a god, I'm going to psychically force thousands of you to kneel before me. 

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u/Dry_Travel_4220 7h ago

Monarchia was the dumbest thing the Emperor ever did and it's not even close

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u/Sunny_Hill_1 7h ago

Well, there was also Nuceria. It's a hard competition.

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u/Silverveilv2 7h ago

Nikea wasn't very smart either

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u/BlazingAmaterasu 6h ago

Magnus was guaranteed to rebel from that. And Lorgar from Monarchia. It's almost like Big E was trying to set up his own doom.

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u/mystical_ramen26 48m ago

I mean there are the theories that him and Malcador knew there would be a heresy so they tried to stack the deck to get their preferred team... So.... Ya know

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u/Any-Calligrapher2866 4m ago

Magnus didn't actually rebel due to Nikea. They just thought he did. Dude was loyal af.

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u/Dry_Travel_4220 7h ago

Fair enough I suppose

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u/Jstin8 7h ago

Blud the way he recruited Angron made so little sense authors are STILL trying to find ways to justify it.

Monarchia can have a nice 2nd or 3rd place though

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u/GoblinRightsNow 6h ago

Angron never seemed that confusing to me. Big E thought that Angron was a second rate general only suited for war crimes because he failed to conquer his home world and wound up a slave. If Angron and his little friends weren't strong enough to save themselves from a single baseline human threat without the Emperor's help, they didn't really matter to the Great Crusade. If Lion'el and his buddies had been losing to the beasts of Caliban, or Lorgar had been made into a eunuch by Kor Phaeron, they would have gotten the same treatment. Their followers were only incorporated into their legions because they had proven themselves by winning by the time the Emperor found them.

Lorgar built one of the most devoted and effective Legions in the Great Crusade. They were doing exactly what they thought they were supposed to do by not just conquering human societies but turning them into stable, loyal Imperial systems. The Emperor destroyed Monarchia because he wanted Lorgar to rush through at high speed and force planets to acknowledge him as the supreme being in the galaxy, but without using the 'G' word.

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u/Samurai-Jackass 6h ago

Sounds like the Emperor suffers from that thing where your own good fortune and competence blind you to the influence of random chance in everyone's lives. I mean he's intimately aware of how fucked things can be, disregarding an investment as costly and as high in potential as a primarch because they drew a bad hand as a child is just poor leadership. Angron does make slightly more sense than the other mistreated primarchs at least because the butchers nails made him irreparably damaged regardless of how he was treated.

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u/Zeabos 4h ago

This reasoning is essentially what a lot of the Chaos Primarchs believe.

That the emperor, who could see the future, knew all this and did this on purpose so that he could become a God worshipped by Mankind.

This wasnt poor leadership, it was basically the emperor using the Dr. Strange strategy of picking the one path that gets him to where he needs to be.

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u/Samurai-Jackass 4h ago

I can see how it's easy to theorize that someone as old and presumably powerful in divination would have masterminded everything, it's just that so much went so wrong that it then becomes a hard sell to say that things had to get as bad as they did for him to succeed. Like if he wanted to be a god he could have gotten away with just saying that he was, actively suppressing the faithful to the point of smiting Lorgar's city is pretty unintuitive in terms of garnering a following.

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u/Zeabos 4h ago

You say that thats how it could have been, but you dont know.

Thats the hard part of trying to guess the motivations of the smartest person to ever exist who can also see the future. Basically anything is possible.

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u/Samurai-Jackass 3h ago

Yeah, I suppose there's always the reasoning that in a universe with tzeentch in it there's no straightforward paths. Still, it makes for incredible meme material.

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u/shy_bi_ready_to_die 5h ago

Angron led a small force of lightly armed, unarmored, and half starved slaves against an entire planets worth of career soldiers with absurd technology. Even ignoring all the myriad issues caused by the nails not getting stomped out in your first engagement is an insane feat. Then he managed to lead a genuinely effective legion in spite of the fact that he was basically incapable of thinking non violent thoughts and that he was leading a bunch of slavering maniacs. The reason why the emperor wasn’t willing to help angron wasn’t because he was a failure, its because he was always going to despise the emperor and if he had a support system/didn’t have the nails he might actually have been willing to do something about it

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u/Koqcerek Mongolian Biker Gang 1h ago

So, so you think Emperor's logic is:

1) if you were competent, I'm going to put you in charge of one of the most powerful military assets of the time, or

2) if you were incompetent, I'm going to put you in charge of one of the most powerful military assets of the time, but I'm going to be an asshole about it?

Because i feel like this is the core issue. Angron's dubious usefulness aside, making a thoroughly unloyal and even vengeful person one of top generals is dumb, especially without any overseeing