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Probably a very old question now, but I recently picked up The First Heretic, and I just don't get what The Emperor was thinking when he was dealing with Logar.

He wants to get rid of old religions (probably because he knows, as we find out in the book, most religions are the seeds of Chaos worship), and he doesn't want to be worshipped himself (probably also for very good reasons). But instead of explaining any of this to Logar, someone who seems hard-wired with a need to worship a higher power, he merely slaps him down, tells him to do as he was told and flies off to do Emperory things.
Leaving Logar in the hands of Kor Pharon, who, at best, is an old priest determined to find both of them new gods to worship, but is very likely an agent of Chaos who has been following the Big Bad Fours master-plan since day one. Plus a handful of Custodes who were, somehow, supposed to keep an eye on tens of thousands of Logars Space Marines.
Even flying into the Eye of Terror (basically Chaos's front door) didn't stir the Emperor into action.

To me, it just doesn't make sense that the Emperor didn't really try to do anything to get Logar off the path he was on.
The only explanation I can think off is, did the Emperor know that the Heresy was coming? And that he had pretty much already lost when the Primarchs were kidnapped (another problem I have with the book, but one question at a time), and so he concentrated on getting as much of his grand plan done as possible, before it all when pear-shaped, instead of trying to fight the inevitable?
But if that was the case, why gather up the Primarchs in the first place? The crusade seemed to be doing okay without them, and trapped on their homeworlds they wouldn't be much of a threat.

Am I on the right track? Or am I just reading way too much into it, and, basically, it's hard to write about the Heresy without characters being a bit stupid sometimes?

Well people do stupid and say things - especially families - think abnout stuff in your own family, now imagine ruling the galaxy and doing the same. History has quite a few things like this with royal families, emperors etc.

As I read it the Emp was annoyed more that Logar is wasting time on monumnets and wants him to get on with manly, conquering stuff like his other brothers.

But yeah the Emp is often a dick.

All stories (apparently) require characters to get a case of stupid at some point.

The Emperor was many things, one thing he was not was a good leader. A basic tenet of leadership is (when practical) criticize in private and praise in public. Slapping down shaming Lorgar in such a demeaning way was a gross mistake. Such a mistake that it clearly could be argued that it was the mistake that killed the human empire.

Keeping critical information from his commanding generals who were also his sons was another boneheaded mistake. After all the power and authority he had bestowed on the primarchs he ultimately still didn't trust them. That wounded them all and half didn't cope with it well.

Also BL and GW sometimes write themselves into corners that then forces characters to do really dumb things.

Ultimately the Big E's giant ego was his undoing. He created super beings and then still treated them like children and couldn't even do that right.

Of course how many of us could be a single dad with 20 sons and have them all grow up okay? So the big E is clearly fallible.

Thats kind of the sad part about the way they have written the Heresy. It was ultimately the result of the Emperor making some really stupid choices, not due to the ultimate power and evil of Chaos.

 aku-chan wrote:
The only explanation I can think off is, did the Emperor know that the Heresy was coming?

No, he didn't. It is extremely important to understand that the chaos gods were actively blocking his ability to foresee anything leading up to the time of the Heresy. He knew they were going to do something to try and stop him and buy he didn't know how or with who. The completion of the webway project and the Great Crusade as fast possible was the best defense he had to try and prevent whatever it was chaos was going to do to try and stop him.

Second, from the Emperor's prospective, the primarchs, with the exception of Horus, were not sons and he would never truly view them as sons. They were tools. He expected them to do exactly as they were told. The fact that the primarchs saw him as a father rather than a creator and expected him to treat them as such is where the fault lies.

Yeah, in the latter years it seems that the Gods simply used Big E's stupidity to orchestrate the Heresy. I don't really like that, altough it does make the Emperor a bit more human and relatable (we all make mistakes). However I really don't like the tact that he slowly turns into a punching bag for BL, as clearly EVERYTHING is his fault and the Traitors were right all along.

The Emperor is not stupid but it has a big lack of emotional intelligence, is not a diplomathic, he can´t empathyze with the others well. Is a god of war more than a good father, he dones not manage well emotions, or the feelings of the lesser beings.

If you read the Holy Bible probably you will find lot of parallellism with our cristian god.

That's sort of the point. You're not meant to understand the Emperor's actions or even his thoughts. He's pretty much a god. He's seen more lifetimes than any human times a million. Something that makes perfect sense to him, might not make perfect sense to you.

But if we go with "But he's still human and what he did is stupid" angle, I posit to you this...

What makes you think the Emperor didn't know what he was doing when he smacked down Lorgar?

Oh come on, Lil L worshiped Big E as he thought Big E was a god.

Guess what would happen if Lil L discovered that there really were godlike immortals with powers that span the galaxy from another realm... You don't need to guess because we saw the result!

I guess the best hope L had was to have the wool pulled over his eyes, but unfortunately he saw through it and succumbed to his weakness of worship fetish.

The Emperor thought the Primarchs were perfect, he made them so, he could not understand or acknowledge that they were not so.

Remember that the version of events played out in the book, the First Heretic, might not actually be the facts. The daemon Ingethel might not be telling the whole truth...

Additionally, Graham McNeil lays it out in the Outcast Dead that the Emperor was essentially allowing the Chaos Gods to check-mate him so that Humanity itself would survive. Much like the God-Emperor that the character was named after, the Emperor used about as much prescience as necessary to ensure his interests would survive him, and let the rest sort itself out.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I had an inkling I was on the wrong track, which is a shame because I rather liked the idea of a tragic Emperor who could do nothing but watch everything fall apart.

Guess I should have read a bit more before forming an opinion.