The Butcher's Nails should be removed from the lore! And why Angron is the worst Primarch!

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**Karhedron**

chaos0xomega wrote:
Karhedron wrote:
chaos0xomega wrote:
My take of it is that the Emperor could have removed the Butcher's Nails if he wanted to, just as he could have saved the Gladiators on Nuceria... he just chose not to.

"Master of Mankind" makes it clear this is not the case.

‘Do you see?’ the Emperor asked.

Arkhan saw. The tendrils were sunk deep, rooted in the meat of the brain, threaded to the nervous system, and down in roughly serpentine coils around the spinal column. Every movement must have been agony for the primarch, feeding back into the base emotions of anger and spite.

Worse, the brain’s limbic lobe and insular cortex were more than just savaged by the pain engine’s insertion; they had been surgically attacked and removed even before implantation. The device hammered into his skull hadn’t ruined those sections of the brain – it had replaced them. Ugly black cybernetics showed on the internal scans, in place of entire sections of the primarch’s brain tissue.

‘They are the only thing keeping him alive,’ Arkhan said.

Removing the Nail would be fatal as they have taken over the functions of the removed portions of Angon's brain meaning he could not survive without them. I do agree though that the Emperor could have handled Nuceria better and rescued Angron's friends as well as him.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch. I was there when it was written. A couple sentences before this section you quoted, Arkhan asks the Emperor if he can remove the nails, and the Emperor answers, literally, "of course". The implication of the passage in general is that the Emperor is able to remove them, but he isn't necessarily able to repair the damage done to Angron and there are risks in attempting to do so, ergo "a compromised primarch is still a primarch" a few paragraphs later is his justification for not trying, as he risks losing Angron entirely if he removes the nails but isn't able to rebuild him successfully, etc.

I take that sentence to be the Emperor being literal. He is speaking to a member of the Mechanicum and so answer the question literally rather than the one Arkhan meant. I took the above to mean that removing the Nails would be fatal, not simply risky.

**locarno24**

Remember it's a piece of badly understood archeotech in what is not actually a human brain.

When presented with a wounded horus even a Legion chief apothecary was left at 'feth knows how some of his organs actually work'

**chaos0xomega**

Karhedron wrote:
chaos0xomega wrote:
Karhedron wrote:
chaos0xomega wrote:
My take of it is that the Emperor could have removed the Butcher's Nails if he wanted to, just as he could have saved the Gladiators on Nuceria... he just chose not to.

"Master of Mankind" makes it clear this is not the case.

‘Do you see?’ the Emperor asked.

Arkhan saw. The tendrils were sunk deep, rooted in the meat of the brain, threaded to the nervous system, and down in roughly serpentine coils around the spinal column. Every movement must have been agony for the primarch, feeding back into the base emotions of anger and spite.

Worse, the brain’s limbic lobe and insular cortex were more than just savaged by the pain engine’s insertion; they had been surgically attacked and removed even before implantation. The device hammered into his skull hadn’t ruined those sections of the brain – it had replaced them. Ugly black cybernetics showed on the internal scans, in place of entire sections of the primarch’s brain tissue.

‘They are the only thing keeping him alive,’ Arkhan said.

Removing the Nail would be fatal as they have taken over the functions of the removed portions of Angon's brain meaning he could not survive without them. I do agree though that the Emperor could have handled Nuceria better and rescued Angron's friends as well as him.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch. I was there when it was written. A couple sentences before this section you quoted, Arkhan asks the Emperor if he can remove the nails, and the Emperor answers, literally, "of course". The implication of the passage in general is that the Emperor is able to remove them, but he isn't necessarily able to repair the damage done to Angron and there are risks in attempting to do so, ergo "a compromised primarch is still a primarch" a few paragraphs later is his justification for not trying, as he risks losing Angron entirely if he removes the nails but isn't able to rebuild him successfully, etc.

I take that sentence to be the Emperor being literal. He is speaking to a member of the Mechanicum and so answer the question literally rather than the one Arkhan meant. I took the above to mean that removing the Nails would be fatal, not simply risky.

Somehow I don't think when the Emperor said "of course" he meant "yeah, I can totally just go ahead and pull the thing right out, no problem. Dude its hooked up to prolly gonna die tho, lol", which is basically the literal answer to that question.

"Yeah I can remove it, but doing so might make Angron less useful to me" seems a more rational answer.

**Mr Nobody**

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet, but could this be another example of the HH books accelerating progression? I have heard similar complaints with how quickly Horus was corrupted. Perhaps if the hazards of the nails had presented themselves at a much later date in the crusades it would have been difficult to counteract them. The butcher nails would be entrenched both physically and culturally. Not to mention decommissioning an entire legion for who knows how long.

**queen_annes_revenge**

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the nails, and lorgars observations of them, are instrumental in the story arc of his trying to save him, realising he can't, bar turning him into a Daemon Prince of khorne. That's a pretty big part of the WE lore.