<![CDATA[Latest posts for the thread "What was the point in lorgar?"]]>

Wyldhunt wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
My question assumes 2 things

it is true that each primarch was designed with a specific role in mind
that chaos never stole away all 20 baby primarchs

In this scenario why would the emperor want a zealot in his atheist science driven empire? What’s would his role have been, book keeper??

I might be breaking the rules of the discussion here, but my head canon is that it's not quite true that the emperor designed the primarchs for specific jobs. Rather, I feel like each primarch is meant to reflect a fragment of the emperor as a whole. Magnus is his hubris/curiosity. Russ is his "do what you gotta do" face. Etc. So rather than building, say, Russ to be his executioner, I think he started by building a primarch out of his more cut throat and primal strands of DNA, saw roughly what that would look like, then did some touch-ups/made some plans that would facilitate Russ serving as an executioner.

See, I think the Emperor is an extra special lonely boy. He spent a long time being painfully alone as the only (non-shoggothy) entity on his own level. Those rare individuals that were spectacular enough to connect with him on some level (Malcador) could never quite get him, and then they would die, leaving him alone again for however long it took humanity to spit out another fleeting friend.

That's why the Emperor "cares" about humanity. It's not that he's just a really nice guy (he's not; look at what he does to people). It's probably not even that he needs the combined might of humanity to defeat chaos or tyranids or whatever (he could probably just ditch this galaxy for another one or something.) No, he's concerned with humanity because he believes that a species that has spread across an entire galaxy, if given the guidance and technology to thrive, might eventually manage to evolve and spit out another creature on his level. Not some gibbering chaos god that only thinks about its own hunger. Not some alien entity that is ultimately inhuman and dissimilar from the "human" emperor. He wants someone else like him so that he doesn't have to go on being Dr. Manhatten all by himself.

So what does that have to do with Lorgar? I like to think that Lorgar was the part of the Emperor that believed in something greater. To the Emperor, that something greater is the ascension of humanity and the hope that his eternal loneliness might end. But then Lorgar came to the most horrifying conclusion possible. The part of the Emperor that believes in something greater decided that the Emperor was a god. Etheral. Unreachable. Forever above all lesser entities. The Emperor held up a mirror, and the reflection told him he would always be alone. That's partly why the Emperor has such a hate on for religion. Everywhere he goes, people liken him to a god, tell him that he's impossibly beyond them. By exalting science and the ascension of humanity, he's refusing that premise and insisting that someday he won't be all alone.

And now he sits, unspeaking, secluded. Psychically watching humanity imploded and fall ever further from ascension. And all the while, prayers ring out in the warp, calling him a god. Promising him that he'll always be alone.

So yeah. If Lorgar hadn't gotten kicked across the galaxy by chaos, maybe the Emperor would've tried to make him see the potential in humanity. Sort of like Magnus, but without the focus on psykers.