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The fact that the Imperium only exists because of Malcadors actions suggests the Emperor was not even remotely as competent as he is made out to be. A gambler and person to take actions on an almost unimaginable scale, sure, but in sheer ruling competence?

@OldZoggy, can't see your Picture :-(

The exact relationship between Malcador and the emperor has always been kinda ambiguous. We still have no explanation where he came from.

I think you've all got it wrong. The Emperor is someone who plays a long con game with thousands of years to payoff. There's evidence to suggest the emperor defeated the C'tan void dragon and impresioned it on Mars (thousands of years before there was space travel. This C'tan directly influenced the inhabitants of mars, eventually leading to the creation of the Adaptus Mechanicus. This is a plan with thousands of years of forethought and planning.

If you can assume it's true that he planned thousands of years of ahead of time in order to create the Mechanicum, we can assume that he has at least as much ability to see into the future in order to account and plan for any major events in the course of human development.

The Emperor is often shown as being introspective but careless of any one else's thoughts or feelings unless they advance a need of his. That's because the Emperor has already planned out the lives, and fates of all the primarchs thousands of years before they were even created.

Someone earlier mentioned that the Emperor is like Paul Atreides from Dune. It's close but not quite. Paul could see the path to humanities ultimate salvation but he didn't have the stomach to do what was necessary. He couldn't sacrifice and enslave humanity. So Paul's son did. Paul's son planned for events thousands of years into the future and manufactured a society so oppressed under rule that when he finally allowed himself to die, humanity had a renassaince and massive expansion that allowed them to survive a threat they couldn't have otherwise. That's the game the Emperor's playing. Manufacture the only future in which humanity will survive, by any means necessary.

Emps is a good guy.
He's a brutal, fundamentalist warlord but his aims are noble and his goals essential.

He was given a window to save humanity and did it.

Sure he could have sat down with every son and tried to talk out their abandonment issues. Remember though, that he created them for a purpose, they were intended to be raised by him not by wolves or gotham's streets or witch covens.
When they were scattered, his plan was set back considerably. When he found them he put them back to work, in most instances they did the job they were created to do.

Sure he could have sat down with each world and debated them all into joining the Imperium. Maybe he could have been more diplomatic to the alien scum who were even then, feasting on the wreckage on humanity's far flung exodus.

All of this would have cost more time and lives that he didn't think needed to be wasted.

He trusted his sons, and in Dorn, Corax, Ferrus, Sangunius, Khan and Vulkan his trust was not misplaced.

Was he wrong to trust Fulgrim, the camp son? That would have been discriminatory and in any case, Fulgrim seemed a model Primarch, as did Horus. Maybe he could have reigned in the big blue Robot's empire building or the Lion's lies, but at the time they were serving their purpose.

Perturabo and Lorgar had issues but they were largely compliant sons. Their problems were respectively buried deep and seemingly superficial. My son worships me? At least he's not fething Night Haunter.

There is evidence that he applied his censure where it was due. His attention was focused on the Thousand Sons and the complaints he was getting, the World eaters and the lack of all and any survivors (not a bad thing against xenos) and the Night Lords especially.

Here he expected wizards, berzerkers and spectres to behave like noble astartes and perhaps that was his downfall.

It certainly didn't leave any time to look into the wolves and their blatant disregard for Nikea.

The Emperor was racing against time- the emergent psychic race, the window of clear warp, saving human worlds before they were eaten by xenos, recovering technology before it was lost forever, the rising power of the chaos gods.

He was trying to achieve the most good, and like the Trolley problem he inevitably had to let some things be crushed under the momentum of his progress.

 =Angel= wrote:
Emps is a good guy.
He's a brutal, fundamentalist warlord but his aims are noble and his goals essential.

He was given a window to save humanity and did it.

Sure he could have sat down with every son and tried to talk out their abandonment issues. Remember though, that he created them for a purpose, they were intended to be raised by him not by wolves or gotham's streets or witch covens.
When they were scattered, his plan was set back considerably. When he found them he put them back to work, in most instances they did the job they were created to do.

Sure he could have sat down with each world and debated them all into joining the Imperium. Maybe he could have been more diplomatic to the alien scum who were even then, feasting on the wreckage on humanity's far flung exodus.

All of this would have cost more time and lives that he didn't think needed to be wasted.

He trusted his sons, and in Dorn, Corax, Ferrus, Sangunius, Khan and Vulkan his trust was not misplaced.

Was he wrong to trust Fulgrim, the camp son? That would have been discriminatory and in any case, Fulgrim seemed a model Primarch, as did Horus. Maybe he could have reigned in the big blue Robot's empire building or the Lion's lies, but at the time they were serving their purpose.

Perturabo and Lorgar had issues but they were largely compliant sons. Their problems were respectively buried deep and seemingly superficial. My son worships me? At least he's not fething Night Haunter.

There is evidence that he applied his censure where it was due. His attention was focused on the Thousand Sons and the complaints he was getting, the World eaters and the lack of all and any survivors (not a bad thing against xenos) and the Night Lords especially.

Here he expected wizards, berzerkers and spectres to behave like noble astartes and perhaps that was his downfall.

It certainly didn't leave any time to look into the wolves and their blatant disregard for Nikea.

The Emperor was racing against time- the emergent psychic race, the window of clear warp, saving human worlds before they were eaten by xenos, recovering technology before it was lost forever, the rising power of the chaos gods.

He was trying to achieve the most good, and like the Trolley problem he inevitably had to let some things be crushed under the momentum of his progress.

Guilliman was also doing good work, he was building a section of the Imperium with a far superior infrastructure than any other member of the Imperium possibly could, which would eventually expand to the whole Imperium if things were left alone. He was as model as model could get. Horus and Fulgrim were likewise model citizens who got corrupted by external pressures instead of internal ones. The Thousand Sons were also a decent group of a Legion, they didn't do anything really wrong and the only reason they got censured was because of complaints from the others. Its like a real group of brothers and one of them finds a 27-sided rubiks cube that only he can solved, and hissy-fit Russ and others scream "Daddy, magnus isn't letting us play with his toy" so Daddy E has to say no one can play with the toy.

The story of the Emperor is a moral allegory that is similar to religious stories in modern earth. it is a story of hubris undoing man's greatest achievements. Its theme is fairly universal across human culture. The purpose wasn't to create an evaluatable story of the emperor's ability to take control of the galaxy, it was to illustrate mans tendency to reach beyond his grasp, and what the ramifications of that would be.

I think the main problem is that it's hard to make both sides seem sympathetic and sensible. Writing about 19 superpowered beings who are supposed to be vastly more intelligent than any person wouldn't be easy. Especially when you're trying to pit them against each other. It seems to me that in order to make characters like Angron and Lorgar more sympathetic the Emperor had to wrong them in some way. It makes some of his actions seem illogical and ill-thought out. This may change when we get a book covering his perspectives though.

It's important to understand and remember that the groundwork of the 40K universe was laid down when it was okay to name the Daemon Prince of the God of Being Really Angry, Angron, and the Daemon Prince of the God of Death and Decay and Pestilence is a giant grim reaper with a scythe. And the Space Marines who wear blue are the Ultramarines.

The background fluff was never meant to be explored this in-depth, so of course a lot of it doesn't make sense. The Emperor did the things that he did because when he did them, the Horus Heresy was four pages long. Why wasn't Angron just euthanized alongside the II and XI? Because four pages long. Over the years, as more pages have been added to the story, cracks in the plot have emerged, because not every writer who added an event truly stopped to think about why or if that even would have even happened following a logical sequence of events.

He was just arrogant. He should have told his sons about the Warp and his plans. The Horus Heresy is just a story of failures.

 NoPoet wrote:
Another example: With the above in mind, Sanguinius was created to represent an angel. And he was called a Blood Angel.

Well, the Emperor himself created some of Earth's religions before he ultimately decided they were more trouble than they were worth.

The "angel" stuff, and the gothic architecture, and a lot of other things about the early Imperium, I imagine was just a case of an artist trying to find uses for his old material.

Nerak wrote:

@OldZoggy, can't see your Picture :-(

You can't ? Strange.


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Does this link work
http://i.imgur.com/MVg9Spu.png

I've thought the very same things before but here's the catch.
He was able to see all the possible paths and possible fates of humanity in the future.
The butterfly effect required him to make what would be considered idiot mistakes but in reality allowed all the millions and billions of small decisions made by everyone else to lead things to where they are at now.... because any other choices would of led to the extinction of mankind.
So considering that.... the man is a genius beyond understanding even if he did what some view as stupid or easily fixed.

I mean just sit here and try to path out how different things could of been if he changed 1 aspect of any one of those events.... and that would not of stopped the "Chaos Gods" from trying something different

 Blitzen the Solitaire wrote:
I've thought the very same things before but here's the catch.
He was able to see all the possible paths and possible fates of humanity in the future.
The butterfly effect required him to make what would be considered idiot mistakes but in reality allowed all the millions and billions of small decisions made by everyone else to lead things to where they are at now.... because any other choices would of led to the extinction of mankind.
So considering that.... the man is a genius beyond understanding even if he did what some view as stupid or easily fixed.

I mean just sit here and try to path out how different things could of been if he changed 1 aspect of any one of those events.... and that would not of stopped the "Chaos Gods" from trying something different

Well, on the asumption he could see every possible outcome and action, this might be a "best of a bad bunch." Its a terrible 40k universe but it could be the only one in which humanity lasts until 1

 DarkLink wrote:
Calling the Emperor an idiot for failing to perfect a galaxy-spanning empire is like calling someone weak for almost-but-not-quite benchpressing a thousand pounds. They might have failed, but it's still pretty impressive.

Okay I'll try. I go over to this 1000 pound object. I try and lift it and it doesn't budge an inch. I'm so amazing for trying guys.

 Ankhalagon wrote:
He was just arrogant. He should have told his sons about the Warp and his plans. The Horus Heresy is just a story of failures.

Arrogance doesn't quite have the right ... eloquence. Hubris is a much better fit. More than pride, more than arrogance.

It is hubris that let him see and know that #1son would let him down & by doing so cause untold chaos and grief and refuse to act on it, because doing so would admit that he wasn't perfect and he begat further imperfection from that start.

Maybe if he'd read Paradise Lost by Milton somewhere in his early days, he could have bypassed that bit and become the leader humanity deserved, not the one they ended up with ...

I have a far fetched alternative theory why he might not be an idiot.

Suppose the emperor somehow knew that he could not save the empire, and decided to use the solution Asimovs literature provided. The way to do this would be to open up a webway portal. And hold it open just long enough for two of the expeditions to pull off their trick. The only thing that needs to happen then is the IoM to decay at the foreseen rate, not to interfere with the two colonies and lure away all the dangerous enemies away from them. I don't think that this is what really is going on, but it fits perfectly.




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The interesting part about it is that there have been mentions of high tech indep human civilisations in the old fluff. But it seems more likely that the emperor is just the idiot who was left behind ages ago while the ones who could predict the future with science left his madness without his help.