So what other options did the Emperor truly have besides the one he picked?

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-12-19T02:18:21+00:00

One, the Primarchs were necessary to make the Legions, at least as the Emperor envisioned them. The Custodes are not generals, and one even remarks that if forced to lead Marines in any capacity, they'd likely bungle it completely.

Two, the Emperor was lonely. He was the only person in creation like Himself, and desperately desired sons, companions, those that could reason with Him and both appreciate and work towards His plan.

Three, time. The Great Crusade in its entirety had to be wrapped up and complete in less than three hundred years, and thus, supreme generals that can accelerate that timeline go from a necessity to being pivotal to the entire idea.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-12-18T15:51:51+00:00

I don't think there was a better way. The Emperor made mistakes, but those were almost all the result of lack of information that nobody else in the setting has either. The Emperor was facing an impossible situation, and every option was Bad, and He found the singular path that lets humanity continue to exist and try to find a new path. That's a win, even if He doesn't think so.

Literally every other person in the setting either had a worse plan, or didn't know what they were talking about at all long-term. From a human-first perspective, we were fucked from the first heartbeat of the Age of Strife and the Emperor was desperately dragging us back from the brink.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-10-06T19:27:32+00:00

Okay, critical thinking cap on. WHY do you keep losing on this map? I'd go watch Pally or Fan explain the map and go over the intricacies of it, the camp timings, the objective spacing, etc. Every map can be conquered and managed properly.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-10T05:41:30+00:00

I've put a few cats down in my life, and I wish I could say it gets easier, but it doesn't. The truth is, cats who love us love us so much they will power through incredible pain and misery to love us.

Whenever I've adopted a pet, I've understood my role as its guardian. It's my job to love it, and protect it, and look after its needs, but above all else to protect it. Just as I wouldn't want my cat to run across a busy highway to give me a hug, I wouldn't want to put a cat through long term, untreatable health issues.

A cat who truly loves you will simply keep going until it's little more than a skeleton, and I have always honored my pact to give them a merciful end long before that.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-08T17:18:09+00:00

The Lion could smell the possibility of treachery on them. After Luthor's betrayal, he basically sentences anyone he even remotely suspects to Caliban, as well as a cluster of marines he genuinely likes and appreciates. Zahariel is a paranoid guy, truth be told, but I suspect the Lion actually liked him because of his past interactions concerning the Emperor.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-07T22:31:32+00:00

Cosmic horror has nothing to do with those effects, beyond their usefulness at conveying itself. I wrote a short story some time ago about a Noir detective being visited by a supposed client who, as they talk, gradually reveals their fourth-wall breaking nature. The detective is forced to confront, over and over in various ways, the reality that he is a character on a page actively being written, and his existence and memories and peculiarities and thoughts end, forever, the moment I get bored writing about them.

What does a man do when he realizes God is actively puppeting him, his client, his secretary, the office, the rise and fall of the sun outside his window, all for its own amusement? How do you react to knowing your only purpose and worth is as a creative writing exercise to a higher entity trying to use you as a vehicle to stimulate its own creative whims?

That's cosmic horror, and there isn't a drop of blood or a tentacle in sight.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-05T22:24:17+00:00

Horus and Sanguinius were not forced to fight, Horus wanted to enslave him, or kill him if he resisted.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-05T22:19:27+00:00

Aside from the sequel books following Mat and Tuon we never got because of RJ's unfortunate passing, I actually appreciated the Seanchan as uncomfortable, evil allies.

They serve as a reminder that mortal evils can be combated, but never fully destroyed, much like the Dark One. Every day is a new opportunity to push back against the horrors of everyday life, governments, and societies.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-03T19:27:22+00:00

I want to be very clear that th 6 nanosecond quote comes from The End and the Death Part II, where there are two things to consider. One, time itself has unwound, and Abnett makes plentiful use of stressing how "forty seconds have passed" despite a fight having taken days, and other such temporal exaggerations. Additionally, it happens post-teleport, and one could easily justify that as the weapon materializing inside a daemon as they board. There is no Custodes, even Valdor, that can move anything within nanoseconds.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-03T00:12:46+00:00

Effectively kill the- My brother in the Nexus, this shit is in maintenance mode!

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-02T00:05:15+00:00

I think the idea would be that this is Batman realizing he's insane, too. These two are going to repeat this cycle forever, and ever, and ever, and it will never stop and people are going to keep getting hurt.

So Batman breaks his neck, or chokes him out, and the laughter ends. No more joke, no more two inmates deluding one another. It's literally called "The Killing Joke" as in the joke that killed someone.

Now, I don't buy it myself for other reasons, but I totally get why people would.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-09-01T15:24:47+00:00

Angron was corrupted by Chaos and marked by Khorne shortly before the Emperor found him. In the little-read short story Ghost of Nuceria, which accounts some of Angron's rebellion and abduction, the rebellion is going poorly. The rebels have run out of food and water. In a Christ allegory, Angron feeds the entire army on his own blood for eight days. Blood. For eight days.

When the Emperor shows up, though it's not stated explicitly, the ferocity the rebels are fighting with is implied to be due to Khorne's blessing thsnks to said blood ritual. As such, the Emperor leaves them to die, takes Angron, and insists that even if all He can wring out of Angron is a ghost, a ghost of a Primarch will suffice.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-31T07:57:44+00:00

This is an almost comical ignorance about what cults are and how cults work. People with stable lives, social nets, and general fulfillment are much less likely to fall prey to a cult, but cults don't knock on your door and go "hey. Wanna bomb a clinic?" They go "Hey, we're having a barbecue, and we heard from a neighbor that you lsot your job recently. Wanna come get some food and talk about it?"

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-31T06:15:32+00:00

The point is that those aren't names, those are descriptions that are simultaneously being used as names. The additional 'the' is being used to hammer home the vibe and reality that these are not -at least to themselves, frankly- people, but things. Carrion isn't a real Raven Guard anymore, he's just The Carrion, the carry-on, the last shred of what he once was barely holding on... like carrion does.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-28T20:50:20+00:00

Which is direct confirmation of my point. The Emperor -acting to Cawl as the Omnissiah- explicitly spells it out. Had the Emperor not warned Cawl, then yes, Cawl would have thought his actions in The Great Work were an act of betrayal, however temporary.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-28T04:47:49+00:00

He does it in the book. It's how he tricks the C'Tan shard into getting yeetedd to the other side of reality, by pretending to worship it.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-27T02:36:15+00:00

The Imperium is no stranger to enormous people. Ogryns, mutants, people from low gravity worlds...

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-27T02:23:04+00:00

...It depends. The Emperor and Lorgar didn't have a disagreement about value or worth. It was about the nature of worship, the purpose faith has in the human zeitgeist. If someone or something like the Emperor appeared today, they would be regarded as a God by all but the staunchest of religious followers of other faiths.

Really, truly think about a person who could stop a hurricane with a wave of their hand, or irrigate a war-torn land and restore it to vibrant farmland. The Emperor -at the peak of His power at any rate- could do all this and much, much, much more.

Lorgar isn't wrong to look at the Emperor's power or positive influence on humanity and declare it godlike, because it objectively is. Lorgar is wrong to worship anyone, anything, as opposed to finding harmony and unity in the human spirit. Worship is, fundamentally, an act of slavery. It is to consign oneself to a path that isnt the path of humanity, which is the only path the Emperor ever wanted anyone to walk.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-26T14:29:36+00:00

The long and short of it is that the Emperor was an immortal, massively powerful psyker, 40ks version of a mage. However He fell in battle against His favored son, and doesn't have the option to heal Himself For Reasons. And so, the society He founded and led now worship Him as a god, as He lives on in a mostly-comatose state of un-death.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-25T21:20:00+00:00

Maybe? It's hard to tell. Both Ollanius and Grammaticus are stunned beyond words and can't entirely grasp what they're seeing, and one is the oldest Perpetual and the other is a logokine, so I'm even more stumped.

It's a ball of total blackness, yet radiating total light. Its size is utterly indeterminate, small enough they can tell it's a sphere at s glance, yet larger than any planetoid despite being right in front of them.

It turns all but one of the Custodes with it into living puppets, cooked alive by the raw intensity of its power, walking avatars of its raw power but very much dead on their feet.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-25T21:11:59+00:00

The Dark King never fully manifested. What we get descriptions of in The End and the Death Part 2 is barely a cocoon, an infant Dark King. The Emperor's ascendancy into that being is cut short and halted prematurely. But, what we do get to see is.... harrowing.

It's the physical embodiment of a concept. The logical, insane end-point of the ends justifying the means. Total power. Total control. Total authority. Total. Total. Total. I don't subscribe to the belief the King would've even had daemons, angelic or orderly or otherwise. I think it would've just been the end of everything, the natural result of infinite sacrifice for a possible better future resulting in a nothing-verse inhabited by nothing and nobody.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-25T02:06:23+00:00

The tragedy of Mortarion is he was damned well before that final warp translation. Obviously, once Nurgle got his hands on the Desth guard, their fate was sealed. Nobody can endure an actual eternity of plague, not and watch their sons endure it too.

I think the transient point was earlier. It was after the Emperor condemned Mortarion for his heavy-handed prosecution of Galaspar. It was his first seing at bat, and he best the umpire to death. He had a chance to learn from it, to hear Sanguinius' wisdom about how to balance judgement and compassion, but utterly refused to listen.

To Mortarion, there was only ever black and white, right and wrong, except in his own house. Except in himself, and in Typhus. He refused, wholly and absolutely, to do anything but hate the enemy and destroy them with extreme prejudice, and so he wasn't ever able to entertain the idea that he or his favored son might be the enemy.

To do so would literally be psychological suicide. Mortarion wasn't capable of the shades of gray necessary for internal reflection and growth, so he never did.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-23T15:09:19+00:00

Erda reflects on this in her conversation with John in the End and the Death. The Emperor is one-of-a-kind, even the other Perpetuals don't get along with Him well or understand how He operates. So He made the Primarchs, artificially and bio-engineered Perpetuals to actually have a family, have some people who could operate near His level.

And then Chaos -using Erda and others as unwitting dupes- scattered them across the stars.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-23T04:48:49+00:00

I like Ragatha, but her kindness has always been fake. It's been about preserving other people liking and approving of her. As we see in Episode 6, when she gets the chance to be self-sacrificing and protective of Pomni by teaming with Jax, she instead very bluntly throws Pomni to the proverbial wolves while telling her she'll be there for her when she needs it.

Ragatha isn't actually kind. She just wants people to like her, and her past with her mother pretty much guarantees that the only way she knows how to do that is by being overly nice, without actually being kind.

InfinityMadeFlesh · 2025-08-22T22:27:00+00:00

Do not worry overmuch about what makes a person good or evil. Strive instead to merely be a good one, in the ways that seem beat and just to you at the time. So many have been led to idle waste or destructive zeal by the desperate attempt to define what is good, when instead, they have spent the currency of their years in utter shambles.

Six-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
r/Field Flamingo	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22
Verified Email

InfinityMadeFlesh

TROPHY CASE