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I'll preface this by stating that I've only really touched on the surface of 40k lore, so if this does not have any real merit then I apologise.


I was looking over the lore behind the Chaos Gods and I noticed that while they cover most of the major emotions none of them are really based around fear.

Khorne's domain is war, hatred, and murder. Tzeentch is change, knowledge, and ambition. Slaanesh is pleasure and excess.
Nurgle is the closest since a part of his domain is despair and the fear of death. But that still isn't fear itself.

And then we have the Imperium where the common citizenry is often kept in line through fear, where the Ecclesiarchy teaches people to fear losing the Emperor's protection and where the Inquisition will often destroy entire worlds to eliminate heresy, an act which seems to be based in a fear of what will happen if they do not do so. When you break it down, the actions of the Imperium, and the Imperial Cult by extension, seem to be rooted in fear.

So if the Emperor ever did ascend and become a Chaos God would this mean that at least part of his domain would be based on fear rather than pure hope?

Thats mostly covered by Nurgle imo.
Fear of death, as you say, is pretty much the main "fear". The fear of losing a loved one - mostly the same. Most fears resolve around losing something you value. Loved ones and persons usually happen to violence (Khorne) or sickness (nurgle). Losing posessions can be traced to Slaneesh, since that is basically greed.

Its an interesting thought though. There are some emotions that are not directly covered by chaos gods... Envy could go to Slaneesh, but does it fit? What about sadness? Guilt? Grief?

The Emperor just cares about obedience; the blinder, the better. He doesn't represent any particular emotion, nor does he represent the absence of emotion. He's agnostic towards emotion, what he's really opposed to is free thinking.

Well, that used to be the case, anyway. In the brave new world of 8th and 9th edition, they seem to be smoothing the edges of the Imperium and shying away from depicting it as the stifling fascist state that it was traditionally depicted as, in favor of some sort of weird "Make the Imperium Great Again" story about decay and renewal.

yukishiro1 wrote:
The Emperor just cares about obedience; the blinder, the better. He doesn't represent any particular emotion, nor does he represent the absence of emotion. He's agnostic towards emotion, what he's really opposed to is free thinking.

Well, that used to be the case, anyway. In the brave new world of 8th and 9th edition, they seem to be smoothing the edges of the Imperium and shying away from depicting it as the stifling fascist state that it was traditionally depicted as, in favor of some sort of weird "Make the Imperium Great Again" story about decay and renewal.

If you pretend it's still meant to be satire from the states point of view it helps a little.

I think OP raised some interesting points.

Reading a lot of the HH BL novels the "Primodial Anahilator" seems to be Chaos in its truest form. On the whole there is no real division and from top down ther is no khorne, tzeench etc.

There are many references to "Raw fear" bridging the way for chaos/ being the seed of chaos resulting in insanity and manifastations of specific aspects. I think this is refering the concept of the the pure instinct of life, survival and the primal "pray" fear that every living thing experiences. With sentient beings this seems to be vastly magnified.

The beginning of the imperial cult seems to be cantered around the very tenant that life can achieve apotheosis and conquer fear I.E. the Emperor being an amalgamation of hope and order. the very antithesis of Chaos and fear.

Not sure if that makes any sense to anyone lol.

In 40k, and 30k, Fear is in Slaanesh's domain.

In 30k, the Slaanesh army gets victory points for every failed morale or pinning check by an enemy unit, and loses victory points for evey "heroic" enemy leadership test (double 1s).

In 40k, Slaanesh has several Stratagems that muck with Leadership (e.g. Song of Discordant Despair), psychic powers that cause fear (Phantasmagoria) or do damage based on fear by directly attacking the LD. stst (Cacophonic Choir), and Exalted Keepers of Secrets can heal and even be provoked to lightning motion by great fear (Fearseeker rules).

Additionally, Zarakynel (the Slaanesh Archdaemon) used to have an aura around her which caused great fear (a -2 leadership debuff) though that is gone now.

Considering the Emperors end goal is to make chaos calm, the way it was before sentinent races populated it with their emotions, it does seem to matter much , from a human perspective, what or which domain he would hold. Because in the end for The Emperors plan to work most sentinent life in the galaxy has to be gotten rid off.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Argive wrote:

There are many references to "Raw fear" bridging the way for chaos/ being the seed of chaos resulting in insanity and manifastations of specific aspects. I think this is refering the concept of the the pure instinct of life, survival and the primal "pray" fear that every living thing experiences. With sentient beings this seems to be vastly magnified.

I know it is a weak example, but I read a BL book where a NL muses about chaos and chaos gods, and it is explained that NL don't follow a chaos god, because there is no real god of fear, and that would be the only god they could follow.

It’s a really interesting point but....

The fluff for a long time has maintained that the reason the chaos gods hate the emperor so much is because his presence in the warp is represents pure order. I don’t know if this still current.

And I believe the latest fluff states that the emperor made some sort of deal with the chaos gods that gave him at least some of his powers and abilities. So I think there’s more too it than we are aware.

The idea of the emperors ascension is teased and GW have made it sound like it’s gonna happen because the golden throne is failing. But they can still decide that that doesn’t happen by any means they can imagine

Thairne wrote:Thats mostly covered by Nurgle imo.
Fear of death, as you say, is pretty much the main "fear". The fear of losing a loved one - mostly the same. Most fears resolve around losing something you value. Loved ones and persons usually happen to violence (Khorne) or sickness (nurgle). Losing posessions can be traced to Slaneesh, since that is basically greed.

Its an interesting thought though. There are some emotions that are not directly covered by chaos gods... Envy could go to Slaneesh, but does it fit? What about sadness? Guilt? Grief?

Envy might go better with Tzeentch, since believing someone is better off than you would likely inspire jealousy which would, in turn, lead to a desire for change.

Unit1126PLL wrote:In 40k, and 30k, Fear is in Slaanesh's domain.

In 30k, the Slaanesh army gets victory points for every failed morale or pinning check by an enemy unit, and loses victory points for evey "heroic" enemy leadership test (double 1s).

In 40k, Slaanesh has several Stratagems that muck with Leadership (e.g. Song of Discordant Despair), psychic powers that cause fear (Phantasmagoria) or do damage based on fear by directly attacking the LD. stst (Cacophonic Choir), and Exalted Keepers of Secrets can heal and even be provoked to lightning motion by great fear (Fearseeker rules).

Additionally, Zarakynel (the Slaanesh Archdaemon) used to have an aura around her which caused great fear (a -2 leadership debuff) though that is gone now.

Isn't Slaanesh more focused on pleasure though? So the main focus would be on taking pleasure from causing fear and not the actual emotion of fear, no? Although there probably would be some people who enjoy being afraid.


But yeah. It doesn't seem like it would make sense if the Emperor is meant to be order. Thanks for the responses.

Slaanesh isn't about pleasure, she's about excess - whether it's an excess of pain, rage, fear, pleasure, or whatever.

Someone is excessively angry? Feeds Khorne, but also Slaanesh. This is explicit in the Daemons codex. The other gods are afraid of Slaanesh because they themselves represent extremes, and Slaanesh is essentially the chaos god of all extremes (meaning that as they grow in power, so too does Slaanesh).

Pleasure is simply an easy way to tempt mortals to excess - a very easy way - since the thesis is that mortals can't say no to something that makes them happy. But here are some explicit examples of other things that fall into Slaanesh's realm:

- excessive vanity
- excessive ambition
- excessive wrath
- excessive perfectionism
- excessive desire

etc.

There are 7 circles in the domain of slaneesh that you have to pass through if you want to meet slaneesh it’s self. They are pretty much the 7 deadly sins with other names, Vanity is replaced with adulation, which is similar but different.

Excess is right but also intensity. It depends what your into. The emperors children’s nerves are connected to their power armour so the feel every chunk in the armour. Not cos it’s feels nice but because it’s more intense stimulus than if they couldn’t feel what was hitting their armour. Excess implies that there is more of something than is necessary but for some of slaneeshes worshipers there is no such thing as too much.

Ah, that makes more sense. Thank you for correcting me.

It's worth noting that the big four aren't the only entities in the warp. So if a powerful concept doesn't fit a given god especially well, it's possible that the lesser chaos god it does fit simply isn't powerful enough to show up very often or is effectively a vassal of one of the other gods.

Also, a semi-related fun fact: Khymarae (the spider skull hyena things you might see in drukhari armies) are non-daemonic warp fauna that feed on fear. They reproduce by scarfing up enough fear energy to sort of... split off a new khymarae from their essence. So maybe the khymarae are just nomming on too much of the fear for any chaos god to get a lot out of it. XD

For a while I have had a theory that the emperor is actually the physical presence of Malal, the renegade god.

He is the god of vengeance anarchy and nihilism, which perfectly describes the imperium.

Also his symbol is a skull, one half black, one half white, which is an emblem that appears everywhere in the imperium.