Horus Heresy series - Why is Chaos presented as the more reasonable side?

[insectum7]

I find the fascinating part about all of this is that, in almost every respect, Chaos is the "Good Guys". Which is part of the reason it's so compelling. The emperor, and all of the ideals he represents, is hardly good at all. We are forced to choose between freedom and safety, I find it silly that the safety of the human race is "good". Certainly no more so than freedom. The emperor does all in his power to bend man kind to his will, chaos simply wants people to do what they were going to do anyway. The loyalist seem like idiots because they either refuse to question the emperor, or they think that the survival of the human race trumps any other concern. The eldar had a much better "good" philosophy on all of this, they accept that it's their race's time to die and that chaos is not a thing that can be defeated.

I couldn't disagree more. Chaos is not "good", not even in the slightest bit. Chaos does a really good job of selling itself as being "good", and if not good, "justifiable". But the only motivation for Chaos is to get your soul. If you are useful, it may use your soul to get other souls, but that's it. Everything else is forfeit.

At the same time the Imperium doesn't really provide "safety". Many of the hive worlds function as "freely" as Chaos worlds might, run by gangs, corruption and skullduggery. But as a whole the Imperium does ensure the survival of the human race. Survival is better than not, regardless of the cost. "The dead know only one thing, that it is better to be living."

Regardless of all the nonsense that goes along with being a part of the Imperium, siding with Chaos means that you are no longer siding with the survival of humankind, and that is unquestionably worse. So even though many of the Traitor Primarchs originally thought that Chaos may have provided freedom/usefulness, and that the Imperium and the Emperor were oppressive and overbearing, Chaos kept pulling at them until there was no return. Whether the traitors realized it or not, their motives began to threaten the survival of humankind.

The Thousand Sons are a fine example of what "survival" might mean to Chaos.

[Zothos]

Evil ALWAYS seems more reasonable. IT HAS TO. Nobody is going to sign up for "your soul will be tortured for eternity!" without a damn good reason...

A look at our own past should tell you this.

Even in movies I dont think i have ever seen the Devil say "Hey, I have a lovely lake of fire! Submit to me and you can roast in it!" without some sort of "reason" presented to do so....

[Connor MacLeod]

We haven't seen enough of the Heresy yet for Horus' forces to become truly, deeply enmeshed in it. At least not to the degree we know they become eventually. It's a gradual, insidious thing. It starts out with Horus believing the Emperor is wrong and that he's setting out to save humanity and having all these great intentions, and then he's massacring and butchering as is everyone around him.

That said, I wouldn't call that scene where Horus has all the Remembrancers executed as 'reasonable', and there are plenty of scenes interspersed throughout the novels like that. It's grim, its just not pants on the head bizarre type of Chaos.

[Jeru]

Chaos finds all avenues in which to taint the soul. Guard yourself from its grasp brother! The writers at GW are definitely under its influence.

[RunepriestRidcully]

Chaos finds all avenues in which to taint the soul. Guard yourself from its grasp brother! The writers at GW are definitely under its influence.

You are not pinning Ward on us!He's entirely a loyalist who's used to much snuff.
It is nice that the traitors are not just being presented as evil, but I think the execution of the rembrancers was a bit mustache twirling.

[Grocklock]

It's worth pointing out, that nearly every demon that has shown up in the HH series, like in "The First Heretic", "Aurelian" etc, has been lying.

sorry but i think your incorrect deamons don't lye at all

"We don't want your galaxy, just the Emperor destroyed." - Complete lie. They want and need souls of mortal beings, but also their fears, hopes and dreams provide form and strength to the Immaterium, hence establishing Daemon Worlds in reality.

They know what will happen to mankind without the empior they will be free to do as they will which is what chaos what

"You must choose Chaos, the Eldar did not, and they fell." - Another lie, or at least a clever twisting of the truth.

again truth, the eldar didn't choose chaos and they are now dieing

"In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There is Only War... you should do something about that." - They've presented the future without context, never once pointing out this future will be almost a direct resulting of the rebellion they are fermenting.

again not lying they know which way it is all going, the only crime deamons are comitting is not telling you everything, and enjoying every moment of it

[Tarian]

Lying is not necessarily speaking falsehood, but also the omission of important truths.

[LordLucan]

The obstruction of truth is the essence of a lie. Omitting key facts or allowing a misconception to go uncorrected is just as much a lie as actively giving someone false information.

[Grocklock]

Lying is not necessarily speaking falsehood, but also the omission of important truths.

so the emperor is a lyer too then, as he didn't tell mankind about chaos, or is it different because he did it for his own dark deeds of minipulation and control

[Tarian]

so the emperor is a lyer too then, as he didn't tell mankind about chaos, or is it different because he did it for his own dark deeds of minipulation and control

Yes, the Emperor did deceive his people. Then again, not like the Imperium is a "good" faction, they're just less evil (in my opinion) than Chaos (usually).

[Polaria]

Chaos is like Soviet Russia. It seems sensible at first and then you find a ex-priest turned into a gangster leading the state and executing millions of people just because their parents owned more than their next door neighbour did.

[nedius]

That was part of my original thinking.

I've just re-read Aurelian after some of the comments earlier on. And I don't get the impression anywhere that Lorgar is being lied to, or even that they are particularly hiding the truth. He is clearly not being shown everything, but he's seeing enough to validate what we already know from other background and the series itself. Only at one point, where Lorgar is seeing a future encounter between himself and another primarch (not wanting to spoil things..), and the other primarch smiles unexpectedly just before the vision ends did it seem some 'truth' was being hidden. But that hardly seemed to be some great, heresy changing implication.

The Emperor categorically DID hide things, lied about the nature of the warp, hid his purposes from the primarchs, chastised them with extreme violence (Thousand Sons & what the Ultramarines did to the cities of the Word Bearers) and was all but openly setting the scene for their dismissal at the end of the crusade (the degree that the lords of terra were interfearing with the crusade in the 2nd novel in the series). If anyone is going to be held up at fault for hiding the truth to manipulae those he wishes to control, for being unjustly violent and horrific, he wins the prize! He decires the mutant, decrees they need to be wiped out. Then allows a mutant who has grown two additional limbs in the form of wings to become a Primarch, and another who's hands are now living metal. Talk about being two faced!

And coming back to Angron and Curze - They were products of the Emperor, not Chaos. Yes, chaos probably did influence them when they were stolen / scattered, but the Emperor is their inital creator. He gave them their nature, or at least validated it by establishing them as accepted primarchs. The series makes it clear that the Imperium is not beyond 'removing' primarchs; how bad must they have been for Angron and Curze to have been acceptable? So The Emperor created / condoned / allowed Angron and Curze, and to a lesser extent Mortarion. Not Chaos. The first to employ those primarchs and all their legions stood for... The Emperor. Chaos didn't make those legions anything, it just turned them on their previous controllers. When the horror of fighting those legions is discussed, first and foremost is the fact that the loyalists are fighting their 'brothers', not Chaos corrupted horrors (Word Bearers aside... and even then, the portrayal is one where the merging of deamon and human is ultimately 'positive' from the point of view of the person merged). Curze's rebuke is covered in just a short story, and even then he has just been arrested and awaiting what could well just be a good ticking off. Of the other Primarchs, Lorgar himself is disgusted by Fulgrim's fate, and as for Magnus, his fate is at the hands of the 'good guys'. It's a shame the bit about Horus manipulating Russ was left out of Prospero Burns, even though it was mentioned in False Gods. It would at least make Russ seem more a victim of chaos manipulation.

Thinking on this also led me back to Thousand Sons, and the way the wolves went to war against Fulgrim. Perhaps the most detailed picture of full inter-legionary war so far was about a loyalist legion being the aggressors, and portrayed as being unjustly so. Again, the Imperium is cast in the role of the bad guy, and the 'Chaos' forces being the good guys.

Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for the Imperials. I just find that the novels have recently treated the 'traitors' far more sympathetically than the loyalists.

[Longstrider]

As I see it, both the Emperor and the Dark Four are running long cons against humanity.

Chaos obviously dangles freedom, but it's a sort of meaningless term - even more so than it normally is. What, exactly, are you free of? Restraint? Only if you're sitting above a bunch of other people in the pecking order. Morality? Nonsense - they all make demands, and the Word Bearer priests perhaps more than anyone else. I would LOVE to see a short story about a shrine world's daily life, in which you just didn't know whether it was run by the Ministorum or the Bearers. Legion of the Damned has this fantastic scene in which the main character is in a giant Cathedral on a shrine world where heretics are being tortured for their suffering to provide energy in the same way that Chaos might do. The Emperor consumes souls on a daily basis too; he's just picky about what he eats, but he also has his own death cults.

The Imperium dangles survival, humanity, or salvation, but these are also equally meaningless words. Who's doing the surviving? What is the humanity that's being preserved? What exactly is salvation? A lifetime of toil in a factory, agri-combine, the bowels of a ship? And that's if you're lucky - you could be in the lower levels of a hive, or sent to a black ship, or forced to try to eke out an existence in a purpose-built deathworld, or servitorised, or simply be a vat-grown slave.

The Emperor is plenty petulant - he IS a god, after all, as the Chaos gods are, and what we've seen of the gods in the Warhammer universe is, whatever their concerns are, you are not one of them.

[Mikial]

Curze is one of the reasonable ones? Fulgrim's decadent torture on-stage that summoned daemonettes was reasonable?

Seriously, dude, have you read all the HH books?

Lorgar is obsessed with being submissive to a dominant power to bask in its reflected glory.

Fulgrim gets rather perverse before turning.

Curze is plain crazy. Batman-style-level crazy.

Angron is batty.

Mortarion is bitter, resentful, and has an irrational, non-functional hatred of psykers.

Magnus is pretty damn reasonable.

Horus isn't content to do his job. He takes it on himself to be the peer of a being he knows knows better than he does.

Perturabo we've barely seen.

Meanwhile, you maintain Sanguinius, Roboute, Corax, and Manus are the crazy ones?

What books did you read?

The only loyalist that's particularly extreme that we're shown is Dorn, who's just dogmatically loyal.


In a broader sense, remember that the Imperium is the stifling force of order and Chaos is the slavery of total anarchy.

Excellent analysis and I agree with you, especially about Fulgrim. Talk about a Primarch who would've made a good Dark Eldar. I would add that although Magnus is reasonable in many ways, it's his blatant disobedience that destroys the Emperor's work and laboratory and really pi...s him off.

[Longstrider]

Excellent analysis and I agree with you, especially about Fulgrim. Talk about a Primarch who would've made a good Dark Eldar. I would add that although Magnus is reasonable in many ways, it's his blatant disobedience that destroys the Emperor's work and laboratory and really pi...s him off.

Maybe if the Emperor hadn't been a total twit about it? I mean, folks keep downplaying what Magnus was trying to do - he knew of the Heresy and was trying to warn his father. It wasn't a 'don't touch the stove when I'm out' moment where he was a five year old who touched the stove and it hurt and that sucked.
The Emperor said 'don't touch the water hose' and then proceeded to turn his cell phone off. There was a fire, and Magnus did the reasonable thing. Except the Emperor, in all his infinite wisdom, had set up the water hose so that if it were used it would drain water that was acting as coolant for some horrible bomb that would go off and wreck the house when the coolant was gone. And he'd specifically told all of Magnus' brothers that there was no such thing as a fire, too.

Angron was another brilliant mishandling. 'Oh hey, you're an immortal son of mine who's pretty angry, and you've got your friends who you legitimately rescued from slavery ready to fight their oppressors, and I'm a living god? Well, can't be any help, I'm going to take you away and proceed to ignore you for a while.'

That's not to say the Chaos Gods are great, they're all plenty awful too. I'm not saying we can't distinguish between bad and worse, or greyness means everything is equally grey. What I am saying is that they're all terrible entities in various ways. And for all the incidents of slaves we hear of taken by the rebels, we just ignore the servitors that the Imperium uses, the flesh-slaves, the serfs, and all the others.

In short: the gods are all a waste of your time and souls.

[SomeRandomEvilGuy]

Maybe if the Emperor hadn't been a total twit about it?

Yes, well, if Magnus had tried to warn Terra the normal way things would have been different. The problem is he tried to prove his use of forbidden sorcery right but failed miserably and simply demonstrated that the Emperor was, in fact, much more knowledgable. Magnus essentially uses brute force to smash through the wards the Emperor had put in place. That's not trying to put out a fire using the a fire hose. He broke the Emperors work just so that he could say "I was right". He could have just tried to use Astropaths, for one. For someone who thinks he's so clever he sure goes for one of the more risky routes of warning the Emperor.

The Emperors treatment of Angron, on the other hand, is a mystery. The only reasonable explanation for it that I've heard was that it was done in exchange for important technology or knowledge that the world possessed and may well have been lost had the Imperium taken the world by force.

[Buddha777]

Evil ALWAYS seems more reasonable. IT HAS TO. Nobody is going to sign up for "your soul will be tortured for eternity!" without a damn good reason...

A look at our own past should tell you this.

Even in movies I dont think i have ever seen the Devil say "Hey, I have a lovely lake of fire! Submit to me and you can roast in it!" without some sort of "reason" presented to do so....

I had a laugh at that one and I agree as well. Chaos didn't show any of the primarchs, at least initially, the hellish daemon worlds, the slaughter, the mayhem, the well .... chaos of it all that went with following a path to damnation. Only with temptation did they turn the demi-gods to their cause and that is why they likely seem more "reasonable" if only because they darn sure didn't show the end results of their fall to evil.

[Juggernaut101]

You know, the more I'm thinking about this the more I end up rooting for the "evil" side.
What does the Imperium really has to offer (contrary to what it pretends to offer)?

- Freedom: too many loop-holes....not that there is any freedom to be had for the run-of-the-mill citizen.

- While we're at it let's kick ethics and moral codes out right away. They don't have any bearing on survival anyway and are subject to fluid changes.

- Opportunity for advancing ones station? Not unless you're born into the right family, whereas you can advance on the dark side IF you've got what it takes...of course it'll be like step-dancing in a mine field but Imperial politics are all kinds of deadly,too.

- Survival? Uhu... a lot of human and xenos territories seem to do perfectly fine; they just follow a different set of rules. "Different" shouldn't be confused with "wrong" here!

- What else? Oh yeah, our IMMORTAL SOULS!!1! There's a pretty little fact no-one took into account! The soul of an Emperor-fearing citizen isn't magically saved from the Dark Gods' clutches, it ends up in the warp anyway. There is a reason Eldar all wear wraithbone pendands, you know... And why Deldar go on slave raids apart from them just being jerks. etc.pp.

- While being on the Dark Side you might fail upwards 'till you reach daemonhood and/or become immortal; in which case your soul is as save as you can possibly be.

- Besides, I much prefere half-truths to being outright lied to. Just a personal preference, mind.

Juggernaut

[Connor MacLeod]

One of the big themes I've noted about the HH series is that there's alot going on in the Emperor's head we're not privy to and he may not be aware of. His blatant bias towards religion as revealed in 'The Last Church.' The fact that Saint Keeler exists but seemingly independent of the Emperor. All the secrecy that surrounds alot of his goals and projects (the Primarchs, the Astartes, his attempt at conquering the webway, etc.) The Emperor is the only one of his kind, and part of me wonders if perhaps, deep down, he is terrified of failing. He has noone to rely on or turn to, but everyone relies on him. Evne the Primarchs are dependent upon him (they're his 'sons'). Since he can only rely on himself, and there re no repeats, this is bound to lead him to not trusting everyone as fully as he should. And not trusting creates potential flaws that can be exploited - and Chaos has shown they are very good at exploiting those gaps. They did it with Horus, they've done it with Magnus, etc. I don't think it's a matter so much of 'Chaos being reasonable' as 'Chaos being persuasive and good at exploiting weaknesses' coupled with the whole 'demythifying the Primarchs and the Emperor' - they're no longer distant, mythic figures of grandeur and divinity, they are shown to be superhumanly powerful and even complicated, but deep down they still have (Very human) flaws and weaknesses, as does the Emperor - there are good parts and bad parts to them, and they are more complicated beings than being simply SUPERHUMAN GODTASTIC KILLMACHINES. They can feel love, loneliness, anger, and even hate, if it is stoked the right way, and all those are things that Chaos can prey on if given the chance (look at how they play on Horus' fears and doubts pertaining to the growing bureacratic side of the Imperium, his doubts and fears regarding the Emperor, etc.)

There is also the fact that the Imperium of the Great Crusade/Heresy Era is not as lily white and grand as it is made out ot be, we see alot of the underlying flaws and problems cropping up (the brutality and destructiveness of compliance, its imposition of its will and rules on those it conquers whether they want it or not, etc.)

[DietDolphin]

sorry but i think your incorrect deamons don't lye at all

They do. They told Horus, Lorgar and Magnus that they were the one they wanted the most, so at best they are telling the truth 1/3 times

Also while they show the real future, they claim that by betraying the Imperium they can prevent it, this is a lie. It's because of them turning to chaos it happens in the first place!

and either way it doesn't matter, Chaos will tell the truth or lie to get what they want, they are manipulative. Telling the primarchs about "freedom" and other perks without mentioning eternal damination is like being told KFC is super tasty without mentioning how fattening it is. It is manipulation and deception.

Yes, well, if Magnus had tried to warn Terra the normal way things would have been different. The problem is he tried to prove his use of forbidden sorcery right but failed miserably and simply demonstrated that the Emperor was, in fact, much more knowledgable. Magnus essentially uses brute force to smash through the wards the Emperor had put in place. That's not trying to put out a fire using the a fire hose. He broke the Emperors work just so that he could say "I was right". He could have just tried to use Astropaths, for one. For someone who thinks he's so clever he sure goes for one of the more risky routes of warning the Emperor.

He had to send the message with sorcery as that was the only way to make sure it got there in time, this is stated many times in multiple sources. The fact that his vision using sorcery would prevent a galactic civil war was his vindication, not the method he send it, that was purely so it reached Terra in time.