Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

The Emperor used to be portrayed as an infallible hero, a desperate god battling valiantly to save humanity. These days, he's being painted as a despotic tyrant who fancies himself and is blinded by arrogance. (I bet the Chaos Gods and the Hive Mind are trembling.)

He seems to make decisions that border on slowed. Many of his decisions crossed that border.

(EDIT: "Slowed" is not the word I used. Deploying the PC Police!)

For example: he lost Angron's loyalty on day one by beaming him up and leaving all his mates to die. Then he shoved the mighty Primarch in a dark room. Then, he basically said to the Warhounds or whatever they were called: "There's an insane, raging demi-god who wants to make mincemeat of half his own Legion. Good luck!" and promptly flew away.

Another example: Lorgar was created as a divine being whose nature was to worship and adore, in a supposedly cold and sterile universe where these traits are considered worse than worthless.

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

Another example: He created the Night Haunter. Enough said.

Yet another example: He denied gods and daemons exist when any psyker, and anyone who's ever had trouble with their Gellar field, knows this is BS.

Nice mixed messages, Emp. No wonder half the Astartes rebelled.

He was not an idiot but he was too arrogant. The Emperor is a god but he is/was not omnipotence or omniscient. He was like a young greek god who battle against other gods. He saw something about future, more than Magnus, but not all. Even Cabal couldn't prevent HH.

The Emperor may have created the Primarchs, but he did not make thim into what they became. The Primarchs were as much a product of the circumstances and cultures they grew up in.

Abominations like Angron and Curze were definitely not planned, nor was Lorgar's religious nature.

Maybe hes only got the pawwah if hes in close proximity.
Lets see how you do with 20. I mean 18 kids, that someone else raised, while trying to build a house, let alone a universal empire.

Sanguinus apologized to Kurze, when he got the power, and realized Kurzes struggle/fethed overness.
Dont think the Emp called him a BA. Was more of a Baal thing.

A bad seed got to Lorgar first. Its hard to turn kids from their life long friends and family.

Angron, he either hoped would prevail against the implants or die in the attempt. But it was entirely up to him and his sons.

As for the rest... There wasnt all that many usable psykers at the time.
Yes the Navigators could see into to warp. But it was pretty calm then, no Daemons about. Atleast until Istvaan and the ruinstorm.

 NoPoet wrote:
The Emperor used to be portrayed as an infallible hero, a desperate god battling valiantly to save humanity. These days, he's being painted as a despotic tyrant who fancies himself and is blinded by arrogance. (I bet the Chaos Gods and the Hive Mind are trembling.)

He seems to make decisions that border on slowed. Many of his decisions crossed that border.

For example: he lost Angron's loyalty on day one by beaming him up and leaving all his mates to die. Then he shoved the mighty Primarch in a dark room. Then, he basically said to the Warhounds or whatever they were called: "There's an insane, raging demi-god who wants to make mincemeat of half his own Legion. Good luck!" and promptly flew away.

Stupid mistake. Yep.

Another example: Lorgar was created as a divine being whose nature was to worship and adore, in a supposedly cold and sterile universe where these traits are considered worse than worthless.

He didn't choose their personalities, he just made their bodies.

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

The wings were an unintended mutation.

Another example: He created the Night Haunter. Enough said.

Night Haunter wasn't really the Emperor's fault. He created a powerful psychic warrior. Everything else that happened was due to Chaos trickery and bad luck.

Yet another example: He denied gods and daemons exist when any psyker, and anyone who's ever had trouble with their Gellar field, knows this is BS.

Not exactly. He denied gods and daemons exist. He did not deny the existence of warp entities - he simply said: "The things that live in the Warp are not daemons or gods. They are just another kind of alien."

Nice mixed messages, Emp. No wonder half the Astartes rebelled.

Your individual points are wrong, for the most part, but he did make a lot of bad decisions, which led to the Heresy one way or another.

The biggest mistake he made, of course, was in not telling any of the Primarchs what the hell he was doing on Terra that was so important.

On the surface, it seems that he was an idiot. But in reality, he simply made serious mistakes and bad errors in judgement, like any other Human would. In other words, he wasn't perfect.

Really, considering that he made the exact right mistakes to create the absolute worst possible results when it came to the Fallen Primarchs, it wouldn't be foolish to consider him nothing more than a patsy for Chaos.

The Emperor was a fool.

Now it falls upon Ahriman to clean up his mess and restore order and learning to the Galaxy.

I smell heresy. Burn the Heretic. Burn him at the stake.
But yeah, the problem is it's hard to write character more intelligent that one is, and it's even harder to make them still fail so that so interesting stuff can happen.

The problem isn't that the Emperor made his Primarchs too powerful They had to be that powerful. The problem is he didn't give himself enough power over them. Short of ex-communicating the 2 unnamed Primarchs, his only punishment available for bad behavior was humiliation or limited banishment. He treated them like sons, instead of subordinates.

It's the same old story, the Father can't fire the errant or incompetent son. It's why Sonny causes the war with the other families that gets the Don shot, and the Corleone Family nearly destroyed.. The Godfather should have not made him heir apparent. Micheal goes easy on his brother Fredo, and banishes him to the desert (Vegas, baby!). And, Fredo eventually betrays Micheal.

Or, the plot of EVERY British story, movie, novel, TV show, or puppet play involving any Royals.

He did 'steal' or 'pact' warp powers to some extent in the creation of the primarchs...perhaps part of that pact was the creation of free will and his hands off approach to parenting both before and after reunion.
This will never be explained but might go some ways to understand some of his motivations toward them.

I've never seen the sense in trying to take over the entire galaxy and kill everything rather than try and make successful alliances with other races.

Yes. If not he would not be the corpse king of a decaying empire.

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.

 Furyou Miko wrote:

 NoPoet wrote:
The Emperor used to be portrayed as an infallible hero, a desperate god battling valiantly to save humanity. These days, he's being painted as a despotic tyrant who fancies himself and is blinded by arrogance. (I bet the Chaos Gods and the Hive Mind are trembling.)

He seems to make decisions that border on slowed. Many of his decisions crossed that border.

For example: he lost Angron's loyalty on day one by beaming him up and leaving all his mates to die. Then he shoved the mighty Primarch in a dark room. Then, he basically said to the Warhounds or whatever they were called: "There's an insane, raging demi-god who wants to make mincemeat of half his own Legion. Good luck!" and promptly flew away.

Stupid mistake. Yep.

Another example: Lorgar was created as a divine being whose nature was to worship and adore, in a supposedly cold and sterile universe where these traits are considered worse than worthless.

He didn't choose their personalities, he just made their bodies.

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

The wings were an unintended mutation.

Another example: He created the Night Haunter. Enough said.

Night Haunter wasn't really the Emperor's fault. He created a powerful psychic warrior. Everything else that happened was due to Chaos trickery and bad luck.

Yet another example: He denied gods and daemons exist when any psyker, and anyone who's ever had trouble with their Gellar field, knows this is BS.

Not exactly. He denied gods and daemons exist. He did not deny the existence of warp entities - he simply said: "The things that live in the Warp are not daemons or gods. They are just another kind of alien."

Nice mixed messages, Emp. No wonder half the Astartes rebelled.

Your individual points are wrong, for the most part, but he did make a lot of bad decisions, which led to the Heresy one way or another.

The biggest mistake he made, of course, was in not telling any of the Primarchs what the hell he was doing on Terra that was so important.

Agree on every point.

Suppose you can see the future, have super human powers, rulership of the human race, the best science gw can steal of any sifi, a huge army and almost unlimited resources to your disposal.

Then look at what he did with his empire, society and his life. The guy is an idiot.

After 40,000 years of living while being the most powerful psyker ever, the Big E thought that his 'sons' would listen to him without fault. After all, they were as close to him as any human could come and he knew all of humanities flaws. He thought his sons did too but they didnt have the millennium to learn what he knew.

Or maybe he expected them to atleast do their jobs because he told them too just like he didnt understand the human desire for religion because he could always answer something with science even if it took 500 years.

The Last Church addresses this well. The Emperor was naive in some way, as he believed himself above all prior warlords and that he would succeeded perfectly where others fail.

Turns out that's a bad belief to hold and the same exact thing has happened to every prior warlord.

There's a thing called "hubris".

He was certainly blinded by it.

Does it make him an idiot?

Since the fall of the primarchs and the brother v brother fight that followed pretty much echoes "Paradise lost" by Milton and that pretty much portrayed "God" as in a similar spot - can't really be all-seeing and all-knowing if you failed to see that epictacular fail going to happen.

Don't forget that Big E is a conglomeration of souls/gestalt being, so for all we know, he could have 12+ voices in his head screaming at him to do XYZ. That and failing to account two basic things:

Humans need to believe in something
and
Sheer, unadulterated dumb luck

 SpinCycleDreadnought wrote:
Don't forget that Big E is a conglomeration of souls/gestalt being, so for all we know, he could have 12+ voices in his head screaming at him to do XYZ. That and failing to account two basic things:

Humans need to believe in something
and
Sheer, unadulterated dumb luck

That might be a discreet retcon, since it is implied in the HH serie that the Emperor might only have been a Perpetual and a very powerful psyker (but not the almost-godlike being he would become) before going to Molech to get powers from the Chaos Gods, which made him the being we know.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: He sucks at being a father, probably because he didn't have a good one (big problem in most western societies, i heard you guys liked social commentaries).

Come to think of it the only person I know of in 40k who had a good father was Gaunt...
Oh yeah and that chick he banged in that hive once...

And they are like the two most well adjusted individuals in the entire canon.

It's hard to beintelligent when you're written into existence by incompetent writers.
Case in point: the shaming of Lorgar. The Emperor could have easily explained to Lorgar the existence of entities in the Warp, and their nature. He could then explain to Lorgar that he himself was but the greatest Humanity had to offer, and that no amount of prayer would ever reach his ears, and that Lorgar should stop wasting his time building shrines when he could be out conquering (note: this would be done twenty years before it happened canonically, because the Emperor acted way too late).
Also,
Giving Horus the middle finger. Rather than leaving Horus alone with zero explanation, he could have just told Horus that he would be developing a swifter way to travel the Galaxy, in order to better bind the post-GC Imperium together.

All in all, I've gotten to the point that I choose to believe that the Emperor engineered the HH so that he could ascend to godhood, and be a match for the RP (read the Lost and the Damned if you want tp know where I got the idea. Long story short, people worshiping a nonexistent entity makes the entity spring into existence and start influencing reality, and said entity gains more power for every worshiper it has.)

Yes

I'm trying to come up with something clever, but the answer is just "yes".

 Boggy Man wrote:
Yes

I'm trying to come up with something clever, but the answer is just "yes".

It's funny 'cause it's true!

I think he was aware of all the risks. I believe he did the math in his head, weighed the probabilities and went ahead with it. A bad case of, " I got it, I got it, I got it...I don't got it. ". Now whether this was a case of profound optimism or baseless arrogance we'll never know.

Although events kinda point to thr BAD IDEA column.

Eh, there is a differance between stupid and disillusioned, people in places of great power and celebrity grow incredibly warped perceptions and perspectives on almost everything, a general will see his troops as troops and when fielding enough battles he will look to minimise casualties and forward the initiative while troops see any casualty or mistake as a travesty. Its all a matter of perspective

 oldzoggy wrote:
Suppose you can see the future, have super human powers, rulership of the human race, the best science gw can steal of any sifi, a huge army and almost unlimited resources to your disposal.

Then look at what he did with his empire, society and his life. The guy is an idiot.

His ability to see the future was limited .

He could be either omnipotent or all knowing not both.

I suppose the question is how obvious and easy to avoid was the Horus Heresy? Probably very I'd say.

I'd probably go down the line of him not knowing everything. I think his ability to predict future events has been misinterpreted as knowing everything. When he was only dealing with Terra, it was much easier. When he had an entire universe to deal with, the sheer number of variables made it very difficult to maintain accuracy. As for Lorgar, he probably didn't realise the scale of the problem until it was too late to nip it in the bud. There is no good reason though not to have told Horus why he needed to go back to Terra. Perhaps Horus knowing might have had consequences that we as readers have not yet been made privy to, and the upcoming Emperor of Man trilogy will reveal. Ultimately though, he was still a man, and therefore fallible, and made mistakes.

I don't believe that he had any intention of trying to reach godhood, I think his plans of making the galaxy safe for mankind was his goal, and on achieving it he would have gone back to the anonymity he used before revealing himself.

As for being an idiot, no. An idiot wouldn't be able to rule a tribe for long, never mind come so close to conquering the galaxy.