What Is The Horus Heresy As A Fictional Construct (to Me) And Why Is It Interesting (to Me)?

What is the Horus Heresy as a fictional construct (to me) and why is it interesting (to me)?

It's a series of ads for toy soldiers that the toy soldier manufacturer figured out how to monetize, so people will pay to be advertised to. Whew, that was easy. That sounds like a blithe dismissal but actually it's a foundational assumption we need to establish so we can move past it. Assume for the rest of this essay that no matter what else I'm typing, I never forget that the Horus Heresy is first and foremost monetized advertising for a commercial product, and that I hate myself at least a little bit for finding it stimulating.

Disclaimer over. Anyway, I'm writing this at least in part because I know there's at least one person reading this Tumblr who doesn't know anything about the Horus Heresy. I thought maybe I could expand that into something worth writing (and maybe even worth reading!). This is really long so I'm putting it behind a cut.

"The Horus Heresy" is a fictional period of history in the setting of the Games Workshop tabletop-war-game-slash-multimedia-empire Warhammer 40,000, taking place about ten thousand years prior to the "present" of the setting, during the founding of the Imperium, the human faction and arguable protagonists (or at least best-seller) of the property. The Heresy is therefore sometimes referred to as Warhammer 30k. (It's also occasionally called HH, but I won't be using that abbreviation; you can probably guess why.) It is the story of a nine year civil war that occurred when Horus, then the favored "son" of the Emperor of Mankind, recently appointed Warmaster of the (at the time) eighteen Space Marine Legions, turned traitor and lead half of the Imperium's armies against the other half, trashing the nascent Imperium and dooming it to a ten thousand year slide into stagnation and decay that resulted in the current 40k setting. Before the Heresy there was a two century period in the setting called the Great Crusade, in which the Emperor of Mankind (who'd recently conquered and unified Earth just in time for hyperspace storms to clear up, enabling large-scale FTL travel in the Milky Way for the first time in five thousand years) struck out into space with a unified Earth's armies to conquer the galaxy for humanity (before anybody else could take advantage of the suddenly-available-again FTL and do it first), and after the Heresy is an undefined period called the Scouring in which the "victorious" loyalist clean up the remains of the traitors and chase them into exile. So it's a bounded period, nine years between the Great Crusade and the Scouring, with a known narrative and timeline of events and battles, beginning just before the Istvaan III Atrocity and ending with the duel between the Emperor and Horus at the end of the Siege of Terra that left Horus dead and the Emperor an invalid.

As "the founding myth of Warhammer 40,000," Games Workshop has been talking about the Horus Heresy since pretty much 40k has been around, and it has its shape because that shape is useful to a company whose business model is spending huge amounts of money on very durable stainless steel injection moulds it can then operate pretty much indefinitely to sell small amounts of cheap plastic at tremendous markup. Specifically, Warhammer 40,000 is a game about science fiction versions of knights, soldiers, orks, elves, skeletons, demons, and monsters all fighting each other, and each of those armies has different model kits and needs a different set of expensive moulds, but in a civil war game, both sides can use the same models manufactured with the same moulds. In 1988, just a year after publishing the first edition of 40k, GW launched the first edition of Adeptus Titanicus, a game set during the Heresy in which both sides fought with the same giant robots, because GW wanted to do a giant robot game but it would have been expensive to do a 40k-era game where they'd have needed to sculpt and manufacture a different set of giant robots for each faction. In Adeptus Titanicus, both sides played with the same robots and players would differentiate faction with color schemes.

More recently than that, the Heresy as a fictional construct acquired an aesthetic distinct from normal 40k. Games Workshop has, in the past, been structured oddly, with the main studio being treated separately from a secondary studio called ForgeWorld who manufactured more niche models, mainly from resin, a modeling material that can (in theory and when everything is working) hold more and crisper detail than plastic. ForgeWorld has now been folded into Games Workshop proper, but in the past it was, though still profit-driven, headed by artists and sculptors more so than the main studio, and was strongly influenced by military modelers. I've seen it jokingly described as "That group of Games Workshop sculptors who split off because they wanted to do a bunch of historically inspired sci-fi tanks." When ForgeWorld spun the Horus Heresy off into its own variant of (at the time) 40k 6th edition in 2012, with its own dedicated sets of expensive resin models, those models were sculpted (and painted, in promotional materials) in styles inspired by World War I and World War II historical wargaming, in contrast to the more gonzo heavy-metal-airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van style of 40k.

In short, the Horus Heresy is a pseudo-history, a nine-year conflict in which the broad course of events was largely known from the start, presented with the aesthetics of historical recreation. Tonally, it's "more serious" than 40k, less gonzo and more elegiac. It is a fictional construct that attempts to evoke the momentousness of "real" war, presented by fictional historians. The Horus Heresy 1st edition game books are written as pastiches of Osprey Publishing military history books, complete with color plates of the uniforms and heraldry of the various forces who participated in it, written in the style of historical documentaries walking the reader through various specific military campaigns during the nine years of the larger war.

The Horus Heresy is also an attempt at Milton's Paradise Lost; I don't really engage with it on that level but I want to mention it. Space Marines are sometimes called the Emperor's Angels in 40k and it's the story of how Lucifer fell and took a third of the host of angels with him. In fact, it's been Paradise Lost for a lot longer than it's been Osprey military history; it arguably started as Milton in 1987 and only became Osprey pastiche in 2012. But I engage with it as Osprey pastiche first.

So why is a po-faced pseudo-historical spinoff of gonzo space fantasy, presented in muted colors with everyone playing variations on the same two or three armies, interesting?

For that, first I'm going to have to talk about superheroes and pirates.

Superhero comics go on forever. There are stories where Spider-Man gets old, but in mainline Spider-Man comics, he does not (unless the issue is about a mad scientist hitting him with an aging ray or something). He's aged a bit between his introduction in 1962 from a highschooler to his current vaguely twentysomething-to-thirtysomething incarnation, but from here on out he's doomed to vascillate between twentysomething to thirtysomething and back again according to the needs of the current arc, like Green Lantern Hal Jordan gaining grey hair at his temples to indicate that he's getting old, only for it to later be revealed that he was going grey early because of an alien parasite, which, once it was expelled, caused all his hair to turn brown again. Until the death of Marvel and DC as comic book publishers, these characters will proceed through an eternal adulthood that never approaches old age. Because Spider-Man stories shy away from openly acknowledging that Peter Parker has aged only ten to twenty years during the 62 year period between 1962 to 2024, stories about him tend to be set in an indefinite now designed to last forever, and even if a particular story did something to set itself in a specific time and place, we understand when it gets referenced thirty years later in real time as something that only happened five years ago in comics time, we the reader are supposed to interpret it through a filter of "Okay something like that happened, but not literally tied to the historical events of thirty years ago, because Peter's not that old." He did not meet John Belushi on the set of Saturday Night Live, because now, John Belushi died before Peter Parker was born, never mind the cover of the comic literally having Spider-Man and John Belushi on it. In the flashbacks to the events of that issue decades later, it'll be some other, more recent SNL performer that he met instead. (They used Chris Farley, although that would have to be changed again if they ever did more flashbacks now.)

The Golden Age of Piracy was a seventy year period, shaped by material circumstances that incentivized plunder of naval trade, circumstances that arose, changed, and ultimately ended. Stories about pirates are implicitly or explicitly dependent on those historical circumstances, and have trouble existing without them. Unlike the indefinite adulthood of a superhero, the Golden Age of Piracy is not an indefinite now that can last forever. I first noticed this while working in tabletop roleplaying setting design, while learning from some of the many, many failures of the first edition of a tabletop roleplaying game called 7th Sea. 7th Sea was supposed to be a game about playing pirates having adventures on the high seas, but the setting and history had not been written to highlight any of the factors that incentivized real piracy during the real Golden Age of Piracy. There was only one continent, and there was nothing like the triangle trade or mass quantities of colonial plunder being shipped back to imperial seats of power, or a recent major naval war that left huge quantities of trained sailors unemployed, or a geopolitical system that left nations plausibly and currently ill-equipped to effectively police their sea-lanes. Looking at the setting it was difficult to understand what all these pirates were plundering, or who they were plundering it from, or why. And you can certainly say "The pirates are plundering treasure and they're doing it because that's the premise of the game," but a well-written setting in an interactive medium like tabletop roleplaying games or fictional war games is deliberately constructed to support and make compelling the conflicts it pitches.

So for starters, mostly because of my own examination of the failures of 7th Sea, I find a limited-duration, bounded-context setting like the Horus Heresy, with a beginning, middle, and end interesting. And it's not that I dislike "eternal now" contexts (I'm enough of a nerd to know about both the Hal Jordan grey hair thing and Spider-Man and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players), but eternal nows have so much become the standard in pop fiction that I find a bounded context refreshing, especially if it makes use of the advantages it affords. To keep audiences interested in an eternal now, every new twist and turn of the plot has to be presented on some level as the most important thing that has happened yet, with the previous twists and turns -- regardless of having been presented in their time as the most important things that had happened yet when they were new -- fading into an eternal plot churn, and this becomes difficult to maintain as a property continues over the decades. In a bounded context like a pseudo-historical war or the biography of a character whose birth and death are known from the start, the eternal plot churn is less inevitable.

Second, I like to watch artists play with compatible variations on a theme, and I like to navigate fictional semantic systems where a story imbues novel symbols with meaning, and for that reason I fuckin' love Heresy-era Space Marine armor. (You may want to skip the next paragraph.)

Okay so check this out. During the early years of the Great Crusade, Space Marines mostly used what's called Mark II "Crusade" armor, an early armor characterized by banded segments around the legs, visible power cabling, and a grilled helmet with a single visor instead of separate eye slits. Over the course of the Great Crusade, a specific field modification of Crusade armor that incorporated heavier armor along the front plates of the chest and legs and a heavier grill on the helmet became so popular that it became standardized as Mark III "Iron" armor -- Iron armor was a side-grade rather than an upgrade, less maneuverable but more effective in heavy fighting in confined spaces like boarding assaults. Later, the Imperial suppliers developed and began distributing the more high-tech-looking Mark IV "Maximus" armor and continued development and field testing of what was, at the time, meant to be designated Mark V armor (as yet nameless). Horus as the Warmaster during the buildup to the Heresy diverted most shipments of new, better Maximus armor to the Legions he expected to side with him, giving them a slight technological and logistical advantage. After the fighting of the Heresy broke out, supply lines were fractured and the Space Marine legions were all forced to cobble together makeshift armor from spare parts and whatever they could reliably manufacture with limited resources, resulting in the creation of what would later be designated Mark V "Heresy" armor in non-production (ad hoc designs using any spare parts that were available) and production (a standardized design using plentiful spare parts and locally manufactured replacements that had been found easy to produce under most circumstances) models, while the armor originally intended to be released as Mark V was re-numbered to Mark VI and named "Corvus" armor after the accomplishments of a specific loyalist general, and also because its helmet looks like a beak. (But even before its distribution to the loyalists, the traitors had stolen the designs and were manufacturing them to distribute among their own side.) Finally, during the Siege of Terra, loyalists on Terra were issued a brand new Mark VII "Aquilla" armor design. That's six armor designs -- Crusade, Iron, Maximus, Heresy, Corvus, and Aquilla (that's a different set of links, BTW) -- all visually distinct but compatible with each other, and all imbued with meaning by the circumstances of their manufacture and distribution (to say nothing of variations like Mantilla-pattern facial grills or Anvilus backpacks). So, for example, Crusade-era Raven Guard would mostly have stuck to Crusade armor instead of switching to Iron because they're all about stealth and maneuvers instead of close-quarters brutality, meaning once the Heresy broke out they'd mostly have old Crusade armor in reserve, and they were the first Legion to be given Corvus armor when that was available… so if I model a Raven Guard character in Iron armor with Heresy gauntlets, that's imbued with meaning, because it's a soldier from the stealthy chapter wearing the most brutal and least stealthy armor mark with armored gauntlets that are makeshift and easy to repair, i.e. he is probably big and angry and likes to punch things above and beyond other space marines, and in contrast to the culture of his Legion.

I typed that awful paragraph nearly off the top of my head; I didn't need to look up any of it except for what Anvilus backpacks are called. I find it semantically satisfying to engage with Horus Heresy model design. Also physically satisfying, because all of these armor marks are little toys I can stick together like Legos and then paint up to look cool. (Or will be, once GW puts out more upgraded kits; currently Crusade is unavailable, Maximus and Aquilla are older kits and too short, and Heresy is older and a bit too short and also only available in expensive resin; they seem to be doing one updated armor mark per year.) Current 40k models are much more varied across all the different 40k armies, but nothing there is as artistically or semantically as interesting to me within a single army as 30k space marines are.

Third… I don't want to say I love trash. I'm honestly not the sort of person to watch and laugh at bad movies because they're bad. But I am interested in observing the success or failure of execution on a promising concept. 7th Sea is, at least, instructive, and its failings informed my work on Exalted. I feel like I have made a good case here for why the Horus Heresy has the potential to be very cool. A lot of visual artists have put a lot of work into appealing art for it, illustrations and modeling and painting; and its bounded pseudo-historical context is unusual and has specific strengths that can make it an interesting change of pace from the forever-now context of most pop storytelling. And yet, in discussion of the Horus Heresy novel series, what often comes up is how nobody, under any circumstances, should read all of the books, because there are 64+ of them and a lot of them are awful. And to some extent this is because some of them are extruded ad copy barely disguised as prose but in other cases they're bad because specific authors with more enthusiasm than skill staked out specific bits of the Heresy as their territory and really enjoyed writing the hell out those corners without being, you know, good at it. I find looking at that sort of thing interesting like a pirate game with a setting where there's no reason for pirates to pirate. The gap between potential and execution is a learning tool.

I don't really have a conclusion paragraph here. These are my current thoughts on what the Horus Heresy is to me and why it interests me. (Currently reading Flight of the Eisenstein, and by "reading Flight of the Eisenstein" I mean "I've gotten back into Elden Ring.")

Legion

This post contains spoilers for Legion, by Dan Abnett, first published as a novel in (as nearly as I can tell) March, 2008. Isn't it interesting how books are published "in" a month but "on" a specific date within that month? Also isn't it weird how I can find specific publication dates for some of these books but not others, so some of them just get the month and some get the day in these opening paragraphs?

Mixed feelings about this one. Or, rather, two sets of contradictory feelings about this one. Probably appropriate, given the subject matter.

So, for context, the Alpha Legion has been the Mysterious Traitor Legion What We Don't Know What They're Up To for a while and this book, when it launched, was sort of an unprecedented reveal about them. It has informed their portrayal ever since; it seems to be commonly regarded as one of the better books in the series. It's about espionage and counter-espionage and the viewpoint characters are all either spies, spymasters, or people dealing with spies. So, I guess as usual let's start with a summary.

The book is divided into, roughly, two halves, the first half taking place on a planet called Nurth and the second half taking place on a planet called 42 Hydra Tertius. Collectively it takes place about... I dunno a year, two years? Before the Istvaan III Atrocity. The actors within the plot are as follows:

A group of soldiers belonging to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, a regiment of the Imperial Army and part of the 670th Expeditionary fleet, basically innocent bystandars to all the espionage going on who are drawn into it as a group. There are a bunch of them and they all have names and at least roughly sketched out personalities and are essentially the secondary protagonists of the novel but for the purpose of this summary I'm going to refer to them as a group for reasons I will get to later.

The Lucifer Blacks, another regiment within the 670th Expeditionary Fleet, and Teng Namatjira, the Lord Commander of the fleet who for narrative purposes functions as a unit with the Lucifer Blacks. Basically one of the Lucifer Blacks functions as the Lord Commander's counterespionage guy, so narratively these are a bloc.

John Grammaticus, closest thing the book has to a protagonist, immortal human psyker and spy for an alien alliance called the Cabal. They've tasked him with making contact with the Alpha Legion.

The Cabal, an alien alliance who are trying to brace for the Horus Heresy, a civil war they've forseen farseen (see, space elf future-predictors are called Farseers, so when they talk about foreseeing the future in this book they say farseeing it instead).

The Nurthese, human natives of Nurth, who the 670th Expeditionary Fleet are trying to bring to Compliance.

The Alpha Legion, tricksiest of Legions, not yet traitor at this point but definitely sus.

Part 1: Reptile Summer. The book opens with members of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad, who are part of a force besieging the Nurthese city of Mon Lo, dealing with some bullshit. Again I will get into why I don't have clear detail on this later but for now suffice to say they witness a patrol being not where it's supposed to be, there's a fight with some Nurthese, and a giant of a man who it later turns out is a Space Marine of the Alpha Legion intercedes. Weeks later, some of this cast are called to investigate a mysterious body dressed as a member of the Genos; they can't identify it and set out to deliver it to a superior for further investigation but the Alpha Legion attack them, kill one, and the camera cuts away as they draw a gun on another.

We then cut to John Grammaticus, a spy who has infiltrated the Genos and is having an affair with one of their commanders. He leaves to infiltrate Mon Lo, where he has an established identity as a merchant, and the city wigs him out because he constantly feels like he's being followed and also Chaos-worship is deeply embedded into the Nurthese culture, to the point where prayers to Chaos are worked into their basic grammar and vocabulary. He's found by an Alpha Legion psyker assistant (not a space marine; the Alpha Legion make heavy use of non-Space-Marine assets) and is brought to a safe house where he tries to make contact with them and explains that he and the Cabal have been seeing the Nurthese conflict with elements that are designed to attract the Alpha Legion's attention, but it turns out his feeling of being followed wasn't the Alpha Legion agents but was instead a third, Nurthese party, who were using him to find them; they attack the safehouse with a swarm of lizards and crocodiles and things and everyone flees; he's separated from the Alpha Legion in the chaos and makes his way back to the Genos outside the city.

Three days later, the 670th Expeditionary Fleet have received news that the Alpha Legion are en route and will support their attempt to bring Nurth to Compliance. As far as Teng Namatjira is aware, this is their first arrival on the planet, but we know they've been here for months doing Spy Shit. Speaking of Spy Shit, Lucifer Blacks are concerned that a commander of the Genos have been compromised because of some weird shit that went down involving a body that disappeared, and believe that Geno commander Grammaticus is having an affair with has been compromised. Some more spy shit happens, the Lucifer Blacks come to believe Grammaticus's cover identity within the Geno is a false identity for what may be a Nurthese spy, Grammaticus eavesdrops on a meeting between a figure he believes to be the Primarch Alpharius and Lord Commander Manatjira but is sussed out and has to kill a Lucifer Black to escape, this sets the Blacks on alert and Grammaticus has to run off into the desert to a safehouse. Simultaneous to this, a bunch of the Genos also have to run off into the desert because the Blacks are chasing after that commander; they are captured by Alpha Legion agents and surrender the commander to them for interrogation. Grammaticus considers the whole situation blown and tries to abort the mission so he can tell his bosses they'll need to find someone else to contact the Alpha Legion, but then his bosses arrive in person to tell him a) no, it's now or never, and b) the Nurthese have a weapon called a Black Cube and the entire Imperial force has to evacuate the planet or else they're all going to die.

Then the Nurthese pour out of Mon Lo and charge the Imperial positions and are largely slaughtered. There's a big battle and in the middle of it, Grammaticus meets up with one of the Genos who's been recruited as an Alpha Legion agent, who takes him to "Alpharius." He explains that a Black Cube is a Chaos artifact, an ancient weapon powered by human sacrifice, and that the Nurthese attack on the Imperial positions is fueling the Black Cube, which, when it activates, will make life on the planet impossible. "Alpharius" tells Grammaticus that if he's lying he'll kill him, and Grammaticus is like "Look man that's fine with me, we're all gonna die if you don't get us out of here."

It should be noted that at this point we've seen two named Alpha Legion agents, "Petch" and "Herzog," who look nearly identical (as all Alpha Legionnaires do), as well as the "Primarch" "Alpharius" who is notably larger than them and a second Space Marine who is equally large and who is introduced as a just a normal trooper named Omegon. It's pretty weird for a normal Space Marine to be the same size as a Primarch but Alpharius was always the shortest Primarch and space marines can get pretty tall so don't worry about it! This will be important later for Lore Reasons. Also, there is a bit of third-person omniscient narration in which "Omegon" is described as actually being a normal, unusually tall marine and not a Primarch.

Part 2: The Halting Site. Five months later the Alpha Legion have commandeered the entire expeditionary fleet and have spent the last five months traveling towards a system called 42 Hydra, because Grammaticus suggested years ago this ought to be the place where Alpharius and the Cabal meet up. Grammaticus chose this place because a three-headed hydra is the symbol the Alpha Legion uses for itself and he thought having the meeting there would be, I dunno, neat? He explains it to "Alpharius" as a tribute to the Alpha Legion but "Alpharius" basically goes "What is this your idea of a joke?" and isn't impressed.

There is a brief flashback in which it's established that the evacuation of Nurth went badly -- the Black Cube summoned black clouds and sandstorms that made everything chaotic, and Lord Commander Teng Namatjira initially refused to evacuate and in the end only half of the fleet made it off the planet. The Black Cube made the entire star system uninhabitable and the fleet only barely escaped its influence.

Grammaticus is being held prisoner on the Alpha Legion battle-barge Beta alongside a member of the Genos and the commanding officer is being held prisoner elsewhere on the same ship; he hasn't been allowed to see her. He tries to convince "Alpharius" that he has to go down to the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius first to set up the meeting, but the "Primarch" is instead intent on landing the entire expeditionary fleet there and taking the position so he can meet the Cabal on his own terms from a position of strength. The planet is uninhabitable with no human-breathable atmosphere except for a big sphere of air on a spot where the Cabal have set up atmospheric generators for the meeting.

The Lord Commander of the expeditionary fleet demands an explanation, "Alpharius" explains the situation -- he's found a spy who claims to be aligned with a powerful cabal of aliens and wants to judge what they have to say because either they're telling the truth about having intel vital to the survival of the Imperium or they're lying and he can attack them; either way he can take action for the good of the Imperium. The fleet commander is like "Oh, you found that spy the Lucifer Blacks were looking for. Cool, sounds reasonable, I want to be there when you meet with the aliens." The commander is a power-hungry blowhard asshole, by the way, and wants equal access to whatever secrets the Cabal wish to bestown on Alpharius.

In the middle of the deployment to the planet surface, Grammaticus uses his psyker powers to turn his Geno companion away from the Alpha Legion and uses him to escape to the surface to set up the meeting safely, but they stop briefly to rescue the Geno commander Grammaticus thinks he's in love with. She's been driven insane by psychic interrogation, though. They get to the planet, Grammaticus gets to the meeting site, the Cabal leaders are all there and he starts to ask them not to take the mass military deployment as a betrayal on Alpharius's part but surprise, the two Genos who went with him were all still loyal to the Alpha Legion (having been turned earlier in the book); his companion was just faking being subverted by Grammaticus and the commander was just faking being insane. A bunch of Alpha Legion including "Alpharius," teleport in and demand to be told what's what, and the Cabal agree to tell them, but only if the "whole Primarch" is there, at which point "Omegon" steps forward and they describe Alpharius Omegon as one soul in two bodies. This was a major lore drop back when this book was published. The Alpha Legion actually having two Primarchs is a big deal.

The future the Cabal had foreseen farseen was an Imperial civil war in which Chaos subverts Horus, which tears the Imperium in two, with two outcomes: If the Emperor wins, he'll be crippled and the Imperium will fall into a stagnation which will eventually lead to total victory for Chaos within the next ten to twenty thousand years. If Horus wins, the last spark of nobility and defiance within him will motivate him into an orgy of self-hatred and genocidal slaughter that will wipe out humanity; in the absence of humanity's psychic energy, Chaos will be starved and fade and the galaxy will be saved. The Cabal want Alpharius to side with Horus and help him win, ensuring Chaos's ultimate defeat. "Alpharius" demands to see proof, and so the Cabal expose him to a device called the Acuity, which shows their farseeing prediction to anyone exposed to it in a way that apparently carries some sort of undeniable truth-qualia such that if you see it you can't deny that it's true. He comes out of the exposure convinced, and then exits the meeting and seems to psychically brief "Petch" on how the meeting went. They then all immediately teleport back to the Beta and are challenged by Lord Commander Teng Namatjira, who's jealous that Alpharius met with the Cabal without him. A second battle-barge, the Alpha, de-cloaks, and the Alpha and Beta destroy the 670th Expeditionary Fleet and fly off. Below, on the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius, the atmosphere engines turn off and all the soldiery who'd deployed to the planet are left to suffocate. Some of the survivors of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad go with the Alpha Legion to be used as agents elsewhere, and Grammaticus leaves with the Cabal, but everyone else we've met over the course of the book is left to die.

Grammaticus, on the Cabal ship, is congratulated on a job well done and then goes to jump out an airlock, distraught that he's just caused the doom of his species. The end.

So.

First, I've seen a lot of commentary about this book, and something I've seen a few times is how mysterious and inscrutiable the Alpha Legion are and that it's not clear what they were doing in the first half, but I legitimately do not find it complicated. If the standard Alpha Legion procedure is to do recon and infiltration of any theater of war they plan to operate in, then everything they do up until the point where they make contact with Teng Namatjira just makes sense as standard infiltration tactics. That weird body that kicked off the opening? We don't have to know what that is, that's just, like, a signal to the audience that Spy Shit is happening. The book goes to some lengths to establish that the overall 670th Expeditionary Fleet is quite large and we only see a small part of it, so having elements of Alpha Legion infiltration that are never explained just demonstrates how they're infiltrating the entire force on both sides -- with subversion of assets within the Geno Five-Two and establishment of safehouses within the besiege city of Mon Lo, they're clearly just locking down the whole theater of war before they reveal themselves.

Second, you'll notice that I've been putting "Alpharius" in quotation marks throughout most of this description. I am pretty sure "Alpharius" is not Alpharius. I am, in fact, pretty sure that for the purposes of this book (and as I understand it this would be popularly conceived as contradicting facts established in future books, but I'm reading all of them myself to draw my own fucking conclusions separate from the Lore Explainers so maybe I won't agree with that either), Petch is the real Alpharius, Herzog is the real Omegon, and "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are body-doubles. Here's my reasoning:

We know the Alpha Legion is lead by a physically identical pair of twins named Alpharius and Omegon and other members of the Legion are physically altered to pass as them.

We know Petch and Herzog are identical.

We know "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are identical.

We get a single third-person omniscient paragraph establishing that "Omegon" is not a Primarch.

Following his experiencing the Acuity, "Alpharius" psychically briefs "Petch."

This has significant lore implications inasmuch as it implies that the real Alpharius was never directly exposed to the truth-qualia of the Acuity, which means his motives remain mysterious well into the rest of the series, rather than his motives aligning with the common fan understanding that, yes, he actually was convinced that siding with Horus and working towards the extinction of humanity was the only way to save the galaxy. Since Petch is the first Alpha Legionnaire we meet in the book and he introduces himself with "I am Alpharius," it's also quite funny.

And now the other thing.

This book took me six months to read, and here's why. In characterizing the Nurthese, the book does two things in quick succession: First, it establishes them as stereotypical Indiana Jones / Lawrence of Arabia 1920s Cartoon Muslims, and then in the next breath tells us that their whole culture is Chaos-aligned to the core.

This bothered me deeply enough that I went off and finally read my copy of Edward Said's Orientalism that I'd been meaning to read for years, and then the prospect of somehow making this a summary of both Legion and Orientalism seemed like so much work that I stopped reading the book and completely reorganized my kitchen and got back into Minecraft for half a year. The only reason I came back is because I want to read Mechanicum because I hear it has cool Skitarii in it, and I only need to read this and Battle for the Abyss before I can get to that. And then, in the end, it kind of didn't matter, the Nurthese are basically just a plot device during the first half of the book; in retrospect it looks like he characterized them as 1920s Cartoon Muslims because he had to characterize them as something. I still don't think it was a particularly tasteful choice on the writer's part. Anyway my point is there is a huge break in my reading of this book, and I don't particularly want to go back and read it again to get it all clear in my mind because I have The Worst Book In The Entire Horus Heresy series to get through and I'd rather travel lightly over rough terrain.

Also John Grammaticus is a creep and the first half of the book is full of creepy descriptions of female members of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, whose officer corps is entirely made up of young, nubile, promiscuous women who get minor psychic powers from their libido. It's a whole thing, they're called Genos because they're the product of genetic engineering on pre-Unification Earth to create an officer corp with an intelligence-gathering advantage. Anyway my point here is that the first half of the book feels like it's written to make me throw it at a wall so no wonder I dropped it for six months. Fuck this book.

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killfalcon

1 week ago

“I don’t do math because I’m gay” “the gays can’t do math” “If I explain math on tumblr I’ll lose my gay card” all of you apologize to Alan Turing right now

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killfalcon

3 weeks ago

An auto-scrivener from Warhammer 40k.
A long scroll hangs from a mounting near the cyborg's chest as his spindly robot arms scribble on it with quill pens. The scroll's writing is illegible save for a few capital letters in red marking the start of sections. Rolled up scrolls hang from his waistband.

A bounty hunter from Warhammer 40k.

A hunch-back mutant dressed in rags. His skin is sickly yellow-green, and his rags are brown leather mixed with batches of rusty metal. His face is entirely masked and swathed in bandages.
He carries a wicked-looking catch-pole and a brightly coloured web-gun for capturing the Wanted alive. Several rats dart beneath his beast-like legs, and another perches atop his back, as though watching for enemies behind.

An unpainted rogue doc from Necromunda.

A mix of modern and medieval styles, this crow-masked doctor is pulling on her gloves and preparing for impromptu surgery. Various vicious-looking medical instruments hang from a rack mounted on her back, and in one hand she has a hacksaw.

Been working on my Necrorando collection, making fun little folk to hang out in the underhive. Most recently I have painted an auto-scrivener (unnamed) and a mutant Bounty Hunter ('the Rat-Catcher'), and built an ex-Escher Rogue Doc mixing AoS and Necromunda bits. Particularly happy with the Auto-scribe's scroll-work. Nothing fancy since the writing is all sculpted detail on the original model, but a few drops of red ink have done a lot of work!

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