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 lcmiracle wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 HillyKarma wrote:
I'm a lover of SM and all the little corny things about them, but LotD is I think a plain example of Deus ex machina.

I don't know if it's a true Desu Ex Machina. While the Legion always wins, often those it "saves" die anyway and result in anywhere from a single to a couple survivors.

Deus Ex Machina isn't always about happy endings, however; it's to resolve a dilemma in an abrupt way: the supposed heroes are about to fail against impossible odds, no problem! Here is a Deus Ex Machina that will kick the big bad and win the day for you, then we will just handwave the fact it showed up because it's the nature of Jupiter/God/Q to do these sort of things.

Fact is, the heroes (i.e. Imperialists in mostly pro-Imperium stories) cannot win by themselves, the stories have no pre-establish foundations for rescue to show up before hand and in fact, most of time no viable solution can be found, so when an unforeseeable resolution like the LotD took place, it's very sudden and jarring.

I mean if GW were to allow Cadia to fall, they can just as easily beat Abandon back to the EoT by having the LotD took down his flagship -- and I'm not sure how many people will be satisfied with that ending, tbh.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I'm not sure about the LOTD being the Emperor's will incarnate. Why is it that he just suddenly decides to create them in M41 and not earlier?

natpri771 wrote:
I'm not sure about the LOTD being the Emperor's will incarnate. Why is it that he just suddenly decides to create them in M41 and not earlier?

Because God Emperor works in mysterious ways...

He didn't. Just because that's the earliest recorded occurrence of them, doesn't mean that's the first time they were around. Not that they're really around that often and are always only involved in saving individuals who have an important role to play in the future.
I mean really, how many events of note have they really shown up in?

 lcmiracle wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 HillyKarma wrote:
I'm a lover of SM and all the little corny things about them, but LotD is I think a plain example of Deus ex machina.

I don't know if it's a true Desu Ex Machina. While the Legion always wins, often those it "saves" die anyway and result in anywhere from a single to a couple survivors.

Deus Ex Machina isn't always about happy endings, however; it's to resolve a dilemma in an abrupt way: the supposed heroes are about to fail against impossible odds, no problem! Here is a Deus Ex Machina that will kick the big bad and win the day for you, then we will just handwave the fact it showed up because it's the nature of Jupiter/God/Q to do these sort of things.

Fact is, the heroes (i.e. Imperialists in mostly pro-Imperium stories) cannot win by themselves, the stories have no pre-establish foundations for rescue to show up before hand and in fact, most of time no viable solution can be found, so when an unforeseeable resolution like the LotD took place, it's very sudden and jarring.

I mean if GW were to allow Cadia to fall, they can just as easily beat Abandon back to the EoT by having the LotD took down his flagship -- and I'm not sure how many people will be satisfied with that ending, tbh.

The only time this really happens with the Legion of the Damned is in the novel, the Legion of the Damned.

Most other fluff mentions of the LotD took place in their own codex or the Space Marine codex, in which case their appearance wasn't really abrupt or a cop out to the reader because you knew they were going to appear anyways, you knew the whole reason those blurbs existed in the first place was to make them look bad ass because it's their codex just like every other codex does for its factions, and the events weren't "stories" so much as "historical blurbs" that were like, a paragraph long. (technically, you knew in advance they were going to appear and save the day in their own novel too because IT'S THEIR NOVEL but that one's still a deus ex machina because they friggin' don't appear until the very end and.... really, that novel should have been named something else).

One other exception is Shontuu's invasion of the Phalanx, but that's a stalemate (meant for the players to play out, I imagine). As an aside, it's unlikely they'll get involved with Cadia because I believe the Phalanx incident is happening at the same time (IE, they're busy.) IIRC. (and yes, the Phalanx incident is actually important enough for them to prioritize it over Cadia, because that thing is making a beeline for Terra and the rest of the Imperium doesn't even know about it. Hell, B'elakor himself is there, making it kinda one of those "Greatest stories never told" things come to think about it)

There was also a short story anthology of them but the stories mainly focused on their mystery rather than them actually saving the day (the "saving the day" part was usually just a prologue to the real story in most of those stories)

TiamatRoar wrote:

(technically, you knew in advance they were going to appear and save the day in their own novel too because IT'S THEIR NOVEL but that one's still a deus ex machina because they friggin' don't appear until the very end and.... really, that novel should have been named something else).

Aside from them being present in nearly every other chapter silently watching and giving our protagonist the heebie-jeebies? That's hardly out of nowhere. Also, the title is intended to reference all three "Damned Legions" present in the book, the Cholercaust, as a damned space marine legion, the Excoriators as a hated son of Dorn, and the actual LotD.

The problem of the novel is not the LotD are unexpected; they are just sudden. In all ancient greek plays, gods are just a given fact of life. That doesn't make goddidit any less dull.

So let me break this down for you: the Cholercaust curb stomp'd a whole heap of imperial worlds. A bunch of imperial forces failed to halt its advance. People started talking about spies/ghosts/something, so we now expect a resolution to this drama through this ghostly thingy.

Now the finale: a company of Excoriators are dead. This is the dilemma; there is now no way out, the Imperial forces on Certus-Minor will fall. There is no other way around it, nothing the defenders can do will change this.

"But we can't have it", says the author, so as Tolkein used his Eagles once more to say Bilbo and Sam from certain death on Mt. Doom, he used the Legion of the Damned to say the world from Chaos. And just as Tolkein's eagles, the LotD became nothing more than an excuse for the author to get his story out of a corner he worked himself in.

It's not about whether the "twist" is hinted before, it's the resolution took ingenuity, stubbornness, or courage and what-have-you out of it by way of a contrive excuse.

jareddm wrote:

TiamatRoar wrote:

(technically, you knew in advance they were going to appear and save the day in their own novel too because IT'S THEIR NOVEL but that one's still a deus ex machina because they friggin' don't appear until the very end and.... really, that novel should have been named something else).

Aside from them being present in nearly every other chapter silently watching and giving our protagonist the heebie-jeebies? That's hardly out of nowhere. Also, the title is intended to reference all three "Damned Legions" present in the book, the Cholercaust, as a damned space marine legion, the Excoriators as a hated son of Dorn, and the actual LotD.

Perhaps. I may or may not have been too harsh on the naming of the novel and how "out of no where" it was or whatever, but none of that changes that it was a deus ex. Random "shadowing the main protagonist" doesn't prevent "curb stomp the enemy out of no where at the end with no tactical ingenuity or whatever else needed when the enemy was blasting through planet after planet" from being a deus ex machina. Deus ex machinas can be foreshadowed but still be deus ex machines, especially in cases like these where they still just suddenly solve everything (it's not like the random shadowing lead up required any extra effort on anyones' part, unlike say, a quest to gather together the pieces of the mcguffin to use it against the big bad at the end)

Still, like I said before, thats' really the only time I can recall that the LotD were a deus ex in a narrative sense (them saving the day as a prologue to the rest of the story doesn't count from a narrative standpoint because they're not solving the problem of the story. Just setting it up. And codex examples don't really count cause EVERYONE butt kicks in their own codex. Again, the LotD actually LOST in a different codex, though I can't remember which one)

 lcmiracle wrote:
The problem of the novel is not the LotD are unexpected; they are just sudden. In all ancient greek plays, gods are just a given fact of life. That doesn't make goddidit any less dull.

So let me break this down for you: the Cholercaust curb stomp'd a whole heap of imperial worlds. A bunch of imperial forces failed to halt its advance. People started talking about spies/ghosts/something, so we now expect a resolution to this drama through this ghostly thingy.

Now the finale: a company of Excoriators are dead. This is the dilemma; there is now no way out, the Imperial forces on Certus-Minor will fall. There is no other way around it, nothing the defenders can do will change this.

"But we can't have it", says the author, so as Tolkein used his Eagles once more to say Bilbo and Sam from certain death on Mt. Doom, he used the Legion of the Damned to say the world from Chaos. And just as Tolkein's eagles, the LotD became nothing more than an excuse for the author to get his story out of a corner he worked himself in.

It's not about whether the "twist" is hinted before, it's the resolution took ingenuity, stubbornness, or courage and what-have-you out of it by way of a contrive excuse.

Bilbo?

I suspect they have something to do with the loyalists that died in the fire storm on Istvaan III. That happened shortly before the first recorded sighting.

Possibly mainly Word Bearers, that didn't turn to the Khaos god's. At least in the beginning.

 natpri771 wrote:
Is The Idea Of The Legion Of The Damned Just Deus Ex Machina?

Yes, of course. That's the point.

 Slaanesh-Devotee wrote:

 natpri771 wrote:
Is The Idea Of The Legion Of The Damned Just Deus Ex Machina?

Yes, of course. That's the point.

Thread is old and was resolved.