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Hi guys,
So I finished reading Legion yesterday.
I must say I was kinda surprised, I heard good reviews about it.
I didn't like it at all, it is currently the worst HH book I read to this day, the Fulgrim primarch book being close second.
Firstly, there is barely any Alpha legionary in it. And they aren't even the main characters !
They are badly portrayed in it: just compare it to Delivrance Lost, which is supposed to be about the Raven Guard but almost made me want to buy a full army of Alpha Legion
Another issue is that the main characters are bare humans, not even enhanced, and actually talk down not only to marines but also to primarchs ! While some humans are said to be "paralyzed, stunned" etc by seeing such post humans and theirs capacities, these ones aren't even impressed...
I liked the Lucifer Black, especially as I read about them in some short stories before. But threatening and fighting marines and... primarchs again. Even marines aren't always that unconscious (and Alpharius actually makes the same comment about them).
And then, suddenly... John Grammaticus. I won't even talk about him.
Have you read it ? Have you liked it ?

It was utter garbage, the perpetuals are the worst addition to a story ever. Their inclusion takes a grimdark world and just destroys any stakes or character development.

I also agree there was basically no characterization for the Alpha Legion. Every other legion we get some setting-building from even small details like ship interiors and how mortal crew interact with them, it builds a feel for how each legion operates. The Alpha Legion? Nothing. It's not mysterious or special-ops it's just boring. It's a plain white wall and the author waving their hands going "ooohh what could be behind it?".

Black Library isn't fine literature by any means, there's a lot of telling not showing. But Legion neither shows nor tells, it adds nothing and wastes the reader's time.

Legion always struck me as a desperate attempt to insert My Thing™ into 30k/40k.

I really enjoyed legion, I thought it was a nice imaginative expansion on the fantasy sci-fi element of the universe and showed how diverse the imperium was before the the cult of the emperor took over.

There’s a lot of 40K hyperbole around astartes but you need to remember that citizens of 40K imperium have had the imperial church telling them fantastic tales of space marines, erecting stayed to them and the primarch, making them sound so incredible a lot of people don’t think they really exist and the chances of meeting an astartes are as close to zero as you can get. So if they met one they would be in awe, it would be like meeting Santa, you’d be blown away.

But before all that astartes were another army within the imperium and there was much more equality. There are numerous examples in the the early HH books of humans treating space marines as equals, the remembrancers with the Luna wolves, the artists with the emperor’s children.

And then when humans are given authority over the imperium and allowed to issue orders to the war master that’s when it all starts to go wrong. And when the Luna wolves kill humans trying to get Horus to the med bay, they don’t think they should be prosecuted because they believe in their own superiority and the superiority of Horus over everyone.

There are lots of inconsistencies in the books about how humans react to the presence of primarchs but with the AL you never know if you’re in the presence of a primarch or not.

I agree that too many books are supposed to be about a specific primarch but the story is told through the eyes of a new protagonist.

Legion is definitely a polarizing one. Personally, I liked it. We got to see some of the cool gadgets the AL have access to. We got to see a hint of how they recruit human operatives and how those operatives are treated. (Not much, but it's there.) We got to see the imperium struggling to deal with large-scale psychic powers. And we got to see the twins being relatively open-minded /flexible in their thinking compared to most of the other primarchs.

It's not my favorite AL book by a longshot, but it laid some groundwork that other books have added to nicely.

The whole thing about humans defecating themselves unconscious any time they see a marine has been pretty inconsistent throughout various stories. Personally, I prefer when authors don't lean into it too hard. Being in the room with something big that trips your uncanny valley is a nice bit of creep factor. Reducing every non-astartes in the room to a stammering puddle of urine is a bit much and reduces the types of conversations you can have between astartes and humans.

The perpetuals are. Um. A thing. It's a big galaxy, and their existence is... fine. But they've yet to be really integrated into the story or setting in a satisfying way. They just seem sort of bolted on.