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  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • The Emperor. A moron or extreme Jerkass (or a bit of both) who basically directly influenced the Traitor Legions to turn against him for understandable reasons? Or a man with too little time, who had to either choose to coddle his adult long lost children or hope they were mature enough to deal with real life without daddy holding their hand?
      • Fridge Brilliance presents an obvious third interpretation: the Emperor is immortal and essentially unkillable, so most likely he sees no need for sons or heirs at all. The legions and Primarchs think he regards the Primarchs in the way that a man might view his offspring because it's part of their brainwashing, but it's not actually the case: they are intended as simple tools to allow him to project his power in various ways, and he views their status as thinking beings as an unfortunate side effect. It never occurs to him that they might be 'offended' by only receiving the minimum information to complete the immediate task at hand because he doesn't actually think of them as people so much as a set of really fancy telecommunications gear.
      • Another interpretation that has popped up over the years is simply that the Emperor being incredibly old and immortal still thinks like a Bronze Age barbarian, which would explain his more questionable traits.
    • The Word Bearers, in "The First Heretic", are revealed to have a "quirk" in their gene-seed that induces extremely strong loyalty in them. Several of the characters who are aware of this openly worry about how much of their deep bond with Lorgar is natural and how much is influenced by this gene-flaw that fills them with an intense need for someone/something to have faith in.
    • Did the Emperor of Mankind recruit Erebus and Kor Phaeron because he Failed a Spot Check despite they're obviously chaos-worshiping maniacs, or is he playing 4D chess and keeping them on purpose because he knew the Horus Heresy will happen and they were the perfect people to kickstart it?
    • The nature of the Second and Eleventh Primarchs and their so-called Lost Legions is left mysterious in the game in order to encourage players to create their own Space Marine chapters. In the Horus Heresy novels, it's stated several times that these two Primarchs and their Legions were wiped out and Un-Personed by the Emperor and his other Legions for something, well before Horus was corrupted by Chaos. The precise cause is still a mystery, though. That said, there are hints of them having turned against the Emperor in some fashion in the first novel. In Fear To Tread, Sanguinius angrily refuses to admit the existence of the Red Thirst to the Emperor, declaring he will not have the Blood Angels' only legacy be a "third empty plinth beneath the roof of the Hegemon", implying that genetic flaws or deviances may have been the cause behind their destruction.
    • In "The First Heretic", a daemon allows some emissaries from the Word Bearers to see through time and behold the embryonic Primarchs just before they are scattered across the galaxy. Not only does it claim that the Emperor actually bartered with Chaos to acquire the knowledge he needed to make the Primarchs and then sought to cheat them, it is actually direct influence from these time-traveling Space Marines that causes them to be scattered. Horus gets to do the same vision in False Gods. It is unknown which group actually scattered them (both seem to have done the deed), though whether they're the actual ones to do it, or if that's just what they're led to believe, is up to debate. Saturnine further muddies the waters; Erda claims that she was the one who scattered the infant primarchs across the galaxy to stop the Emperor using them as tools of conquest, but Erebus tells her that she was manipulated/aided by the Chaos gods, which she vehemently denies. It's unclear who, if either of them, is telling the truth.
    • In a recent interview, Dan Abnett says they often have to chose between conflicting versions of the same tale when they write it up for inclusion in this series, and that they think of these books as what actually happened, and the versions of the tales we know from earlier works being the versions as filtered through 10,000 years of oral history repetition between the Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 proper.
    • The Last Church, which takes place during the Age of Strife, heavily implies Terra wasn't as bad as the Emperor makes it out to be as most of the world's nations exist and peaceful travel can take place between them. On the other hand, Uriah agrees with Revelation's insistence that humanity would have gone extinct without the Emperor.
    • An example for Mortarion is discussed in-universe for Warhawk: A Death Guard captain with some misgivings about his legion's damnation and his Primarch being manipulated into it is taken by a daemon on a short spirit journey, offering the view that rather than the Typhus fully duping him, Mortarion had much more agency than previously believed and had let events on the Terminus Est play out to give his sons a corrupted but unshakeable form of strength. The captain is left to question if any of it is true, coming to the depressed conclusion that given the legion's ultimate fate it probably doesn't matter.
  • Archive Panic: Well, according to the series' 40K wiki page, as of January 2024 there are:
    • The main series: fifty-four officially numbered novels and anthologies, plus twenty-four stand-alone novellas, ninety-six short stories, forty-eight audio dramas and one comic. Although most of the short stories, novellas and audiobooks were later republished in the anthologies that are part of the numbered series.
    • The Siege of Terra (set after the main series) has eight (with the final book being split into three volumes) novels and three novellas.
    • The Primarchs, centered on these beings, has seventeen novels focusing on a particular Primarch each (with one left to be published), as well as four anthologies, nine short stories and seven audio dramas. As with the main series, some of the latter have been collected in the anthologies.
    • Horus Heresy Characters has three novels so far, each centered on a non-Primarch character of the Heresy (Constantin Valdor, Luther, and Sigismund)
    • Before you finish your Archive Binge, four to five more books are likely to be published. However, some people, rather than read everything, simply choose to follow storylines that interest them and read up on the rest online. One helpful soul put together a chart just to help readers with this.
  • Awesome Art: Some of the wraparound covers are impossibly amazing, such as the one for Know No Fear or, more recently, Deathfire.
  • Broken Base:
    • Imperium Secundus is redundant, brings nothing but padding to the plot, and should have never been invented vs. Imperium Secundus is the only logical thing to happen and a fascinating sub-plot vs. Imperium Secundus has some nice concepts, but is overally severely underused.
    • The franchise itself is either continuously interesting and pushes its plot forward at a good pace or it's getting steadily worse and has abandoned all pretense of advancing the plot in favour of turning into a shameless money-grab.
    • New and revamped Ollanius Pius is either awesome or a fail on Games Workshop's part.
    • The Emperor of Mankind is a brilliant genius who was forced to do some terrible things for the good of humanity vs. the Emperor is a whiny, self-absorbed warlord with delusions of infallibility. There's also the moderate part which believes that the Emperor is a good-intentioned, but deeply flawed being, and the people who theorize that the Emperor of Mankind is actually not an ancient magical being, but an artificial human in the vein of the Primarchs created by Malcador, the true immortal protector of humanity, only a few hundred years back.
    • The Primarchs. Ye gods of Chaos, the Primarchs. Lines are drawn in case of almost every single one and the debates that can break out could power Khorne for decades to come. Pretty much the only Primarch whom everyone can agree is generally okay is Ferrus Manus, and that's probably only because he died too early to become divisive. For the most heated arguments:
      • Roboute Guilliman is the most humane, easy-to-emphasize-with Primarch who has to make do with what he has vs. Guilliman's a pompous jerkass and a traitor to the Imperium.
      • Leman Russ is Obfuscating Stupidity and awesome vs. Leman Russ is a hypocrite of the highest order who fails to deliver on his promise. The only thing the two sides can agree on is that he should be used more by the story.
      • Horus is a brilliant man who was tragically corrupted into serving Chaos vs. Horus couldn't stub his toe without coming to cry to daddy about it and it's no surprise that when the Emperor left, he threw a hissy fit.
      • Sanguinius is the most loyal son of pure heart and mind vs. Sanguinius is a traitor who considered cooperating with xenos and nearly sold his soul to Chaos. Not to mention the division of "if he told his father about the flaw, it could've been solved" vs. "if he told his father about the flaw, the Blood Angels would be purged".
      • Angron and Lorgar are tragic figures who had no choice but to turn against their father vs. they're narcissists who should man up and solve their problems by themselves rather than blaming everything on the Emperor.
      • Perturabo is a Noble Demon and Only Sane Man of the traitor primarchs vs. Perturabo is a petulant manchild who is too preoccupied with his own misery to try and find some common ground with others.
      • Konrad Curze is a cursed figure of tragedy tortured by his own mind whom we should pity vs. Curze is too edgy and too far gone and should be executed like a rabid dog.
      • Rogal Dorn is either a stalwart Reasonable Authority Figure or too hard-headed and inflexible to be fit for command.
      • Magnus was wrongly punished and did nothing wrong vs. Magnus should know better than to do what he did and now reaps what he sowed.
    • You're either with Perturabo and against Dorn or with Dorn and against Perturabo. No middle ground. Ditto for Leman Russ vs. Magnus. If you support one, the other side will rip you to shreds.
    • Nykona Sharrowkyn is either cool or overly perfect.
    • On a more meta level, among the series' various writers, Aaron Dembski-Bowden can be considered a source of this. While overall he is considered a good writer, his interpretation of the Emperor as essentially a monster in The First Heretic and The Master of Mankind is not popular with most of the fandom and does not line up well with pretty much every other interpretation of him in the franchise, and as such is either ignored or considered to be from the perspective of his enemies, and as such, not to be trusted.
      • The Master of Mankind in general seems to have shattered the fanbase with its portrayal of the Emperor. Many claim that it shows that the Emperor never loved the primarchs in the first place, with him calling them by their numbers instead of names. This alone seems to have created divided opinions of the book, with some simply taking it as canon, while others go for various forms of Fanon Discontinuity. Others say that due to the words used when starting one of his conversations with the Custodes, that the words seen in the book are not the ones he actually says, a verbal version of You Cannot Grasp the True Form or that the Custodes is having his memories altered by Drach'nyen. Speaking of Drach'nyen, some think that Aaron Dembski-Bowden wrote him in to shill the local Memetic Loser Abaddon.
      • Echoes of Eternity has proven similarly divisive, with reactions ranging from praise to outright Fanon Discontinuity.
    • Chris Wraight's take on Mortarion in Warhawk split the base between those who felt it was a sorely needed revision that gave him an actual hand in his own downfall rather than an idiot who was played like a fiddle by Typhon, as well as following up on Wraight's efforts to smooth out previous Depending on the Writer incidents with Mortarion, and those who felt it was pulling an excessive retcon on James Swallow's evocative depiction of the doom of the Death Guard in The Buried Dagger, even if Wraight used an Unreliable Narrator to deliver it, and made Mortarion seem even more of an idiot than the previous book by having him be aware Typhon was up to something and doing nothing about it.
  • Catharsis Factor: "Get up." If anyone deserves a good beating, it's Erebus and seeing Kharn utterly thrash him, forcing him to run away like a coward, is incredibly satisfying.
  • Common Knowledge: Lotara Sarrin is a blonde (as can be seen from her card in The Horus Hersey: Legions), yet fanart overwhelmingly portrays her as dark-haired.
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Garviel Loken is the prime example. He started out simply as the POV character of the first trilogy, but hot so much fan love that he was one of the first characters introduced to the Horus Heresy tabletop.
    • Tarik Torgaddon and Hastur Sejanus have a large following, the latter more puzzling because for 99% of the series, he's The Ghost.
    • Sigismund is almost universally beloved by the fandom, although there are two groups of fans. One, prowling the forums, loves him for his sheer fighting prowess and awesome he brings wherever he goes, while the other, residing mostly on Archive of Our Own and Tumblr, loves exploring his tragic relationship with his gene-sire following The Crimson Fist and the revelations therein.
    • Ancient Rylanor, a loyalist Dreadnought from the Emperor's Children, is quite popular despite having a pretty small role. There are even several fan theories revolving around what became of him after Isstvan III.
    • The White Scars were often forgotten by the Imperium and the fans, but with their books they became beloved by many in the fanbase.
    • Frater Thamatica, due to his fan-bestowed status as one of the funniest non-Ork characters in the lore. What makes it even more humorous is the fact that happens to be part of the Iron Hands, a legion which is stereotyped as being a bunch of stoic, emotionless cyborgs.
    • No love for Lotara Sarrin, shipmaster of the Conqueror? This lady was placed in command of the World Eaters legion's flagship because she was deemed to be too bold and bloodthirsty to command anything else, and impressed Primarch Angron, Captain Kharn and half the World Eaters so much with her utter fearlessness and aggression that she is practically treated as an honorary World Eater, while the rest who resented/hated her are too scared to act on it partly because their gene-father and commanders back her up, and partly because she has the firepower of an entire Gloriana-class battleship (which matches that of entire fleets) at her disposal and is not afraid to use it - and she proves her credentials by using it very effectively during the Horus Heresy against loyalist forces. She maintains discipline and combat readiness aboard the Conqueror ruthlessly and is willing to stare down and confront even Ax-Crazy World Eaters without blinking and put them in their places (At one point, she outright shot one of them in the face with her sidearm to make her displeasure for his costly antics clear and got away with it), and is among the very few people Angron himself respected enough to actually listen to. Despite being a mere mortal human, Lotara Sarrin is not one to be trifled with.
    Lotara Sarrin: No one runs from the Conqueror!
  • Fan Nickname:
    • Detractors of Roboute Guilliman like to give him various mocking nicknames (Rawbutt Girlyman, Rowboat Gorillaman, and Rawnut Jellyman, among others) stemming from The Unpronounceable status his surname had for a while. A fairly comprehensive list of Roboute's fan nicknames can be found here.
    • Perturabo is Perty (or "Peter Turbo", when mocking him).
    • Likewise, Sanguinius is Sangy. Or (Fabulous) Hawk Boy.
    • Alpharius is Alphy, although Omegon stays as he is.
    • Mortarion is called Mort or Morty. Curiously, and in contrast with the three above, he's more commonly referred to by his full name.
    • The Emperor is Emprah, Emps, Big E, E-Money... "Emps" seems to be the most popular these days.
    • Lion El'Jonson is sometimes called Lion-O.
    • Ferrus Manus is Ferrero at times.
    • John Grammaticus has gotten the nickname "Space James Bond" thanks to his M.O. and the nature of his plots.
    • Leman Russ is sometimes jokingly referred to as "Holo" by elegan/tg/entlemen and ca/tg/irls due to their shared canine theming.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: To anyone familiar with 40K's lore, the entire first chapter of Horus Rising counts as this. References are made to the "impossibilities" of a civil war in the Imperium. The characters find the concept of Astartes fighting Astartes to be absurd and borderline treasonous. Sigismund's dour prediction that there will only be war in humanity's far future is met with amused disbelief. Abaddon himself (who would become Abaddon the Despoiler, leader of the Black Legion, the remaining Chaos-aligned Luna Wolves) even addresses the ruler of the planet they're attacking (who calls himself the Emperor of Mankind) as a "False Emperor." It's enough to make you cringe.
    • In False Gods, Horus tells Maloghurst that "Ten thousand years from now, I want my name to be known across all the heavens," in the context of allowing a self-important remembrancer to become his biographer.
  • He's Just Hiding: Many people don't believe that the man Dorn killed really was Alpharius, and even those who do are convinced a resurrection scheme is already in place.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • That quote from Ignace Karkasy in the first Horus Heresy book: "Most vigorous of all was the Imperial Creed that insisted humanity adopt the Emperor as a divine being. A God-Emperor of Mankind. The idea was ludicrous and, officially, heretical. The Emperor had always refused such adoration in the most stringent terms, denying his apotheosis. Some said it would only happen after his death, and as he was functionally immortal, that tended to cap the argument." Made even more hilarious when in Vow of Faith we find out that Karkasy's now the greatest supporter and pretty much second-in-command to Euphrati Keeler, the chief preacher of the Imperial Creed.
    • Aeonid Thiel, an Ultramarine sergeant known for getting in trouble for using unorthodox tactics, is the co-writer of the Codex Astartes.
  • Incest Yay Shipping: Like you wouldn't believe. In spite of many of the characters being related to each other via genetic engineering, the ship-oriented parts of fandom have largely ignored the implications and just sailed on.
    • There are enough Primarch ships to form an entire battlefleet, with Horus/Sanguinius as the flagship. Almost every single combination has been explored online...
    • Father/son ships also abound, mostly Curze/Sevatar and Dorn/Sigismund, the latter of which truly set sail after The Crimson Fist.
    • The Mournival is often regarded as the One True Foursome.
  • Memetic Badass:
  • Memetic Loser: Angron is regarded as something of a joke by the fandom for being the only primarch to fail in conquering his homeworld. Expect to hear a lot of jokes online about the nails in his brain or the fact that becoming a daemon prince didn't stop Perturabo of all people from kicking his ass.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "I Am Alpharius". Everyone is Alpharius. Even you are Alpharius, unless you are Omegon, but then you're still Alpharius.
    • "Vulkan Lives!" On one hand, repeated to the point of Narm, on the other, a rallying call of people who enjoy Nick Kyme's writing.
    • Vulkan/Salamander vs Eldar childExplanation 
    • "Magnus did nothing wrong" has become a meme among Thousand Sons fans and is often ironically repeated by other people right before they point out all the stuff that Magnus did, in fact, do wrong. Explanation 
    • The fandom's ever-expanding list of inventive nicknames for Rowboat Girlyman.
    • Basilio Fo - war criminal.Explaination 
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • Really, the whole thing is the Moral Event Horizon of the Chaos gods. All the tragedy the galaxy suffers is ultimately due to them manipulating things for their benefit. Even with all the push the Emperor gave to the Traitor Legions, the Chaos Gods still spent years malevolently plotting to bring down the Imperium and drag mankind into darkness, especially with the corruption of the Sons of Horus, the Word Bearers, and the Emperor's Children. The destruction of Prospero in particular is tragic, which should come as no surprise as it was caused by Tzeentch, long considered to be the most malevolent of the Chaos Gods. The followers of Chaos itself may have become more sympathetic with the Horus Heresy, but the Chaos Gods themselves have lost all claim of sympathy.
    • Horus vaults over it when he uses virus bombs to destroy Isstvan III, killing off its twelve billion inhabitants and at least a third of the loyalist Astartes on the planet. To top it off, he gathers together all the remembrancers on his ship and forces them to watch the planet die before ordering his troops to gun them all down.
    • Where to even start with Erebus? Helping to turn Lorgar? Corrupting Horus? Arranging the Drop Site Massacre? Killing Argel Tal? Murdering Garviel Loken just as Abaddon was considering a Heel–Face Turn? Right from the beginning as it turns out: Erebus isn't even his real name. He murdered a popular and kind hearted young boy training to be a priest and stole his identity to secure himself a place in the theocratic class.
  • Narm: Sometimes the authors try for dramatic... and fail.
    • "This. World. Is. MURDER!" So much for using up those few seconds of free communications you've had...
    • "Vulkan lives!" By the end of Deathfire, you're going to wish he was actually perma-killed, if only for Salamanders to finally stop repeating this like parrots.
    • The Last Church revolves around a theological debate between the Emperor and the last priest on Terra. While the characterization is widely praised, Graham McNeill by his own admission knows very little theology. This often leaves the actual debate extremely simplistic, with some parts sounding more a reddit thread then a debate between an atheistic genius and a life-long priest.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Uriah from The Last Church appears in a grand total of a single short story, but easily leaves a lasting impression. Quite possibly because he gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Emperor.
  • Questionable Casting: Most of the narration of the audiobooks for The Lightning Tower and The Flight of the Eisenstein is perfectly good, with the exception of Rogal Dorn; he's given a weird nasally voice that makes him sound nothing like the regal, imposing figure he's meant to be.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: After the infamous debate over the 5th edition Space Marine codex, which went out of its way to praise the Ultramarines as the gold standard of Space Marine-hood, their Primarch Roboute Guilliman became fans' chief Scrappy. His depiction in the Heresy series, however, with his commentary on how Codex Astartes is not an all-knowing bible, his approach to the common man and general badassery (punching a man's head off, anyone?), combined the fact that he's the only Primarch to improve the lands he has conquered, did a lot to make him more likable in readers' eyes.
  • Shocking Moments:
    • The Battle of Isstvan V, also known as the Drop Site Massacre. Among its highlights, eleven Legions battling each other eight-against-three, Ferrus Manus getting killed in a duel against possessed Fulgrim, Corax nearly killing Lorgar, and Vulkan sending enemy heavy tanks flying with his hammer.
    • The opening of the Battle of Calth and the total, absolute massacre both in space and on land. Apocalypse Wow indeed.
      It starts to rain main battle tanks.

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