Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The Webway is very unsafe, but not compared to the Warp. You can run into just about anything in there, and there are whole societies lost in the Webway.

But frankly, I'd be more worried about knife-eared assholes than daemons. A truly compromised section of the webway will probably just collapse rather than hosting daemons for long.

[pisskop]

Gotta say, I find magnus to have a huge character flaw of being an actual giant naive nerd.

He embodies nativity despite being the so claimed lord or knowledge.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Those kinds of oppositional ironies are present in pretty much all the Primarchs, as well as the Emperor. Russ prided himself on purity and fervor, but his Legion used fake-psykers and are probably the most genetically compromised of all. Angron was obsessed with the injustice of his upbringing and the Emperor's arrival, but he himself was consumed by insensate futile oppression. The Emperor sought out all forms of greatness for all humanity but wouldn't hold even the slightest confidence in his own sons. Etc, etc.

[Loud Whispers]

Those kinds of oppositional ironies are present in pretty much all the Primarchs, as well as the Emperor. Russ prided himself on purity and fervor, but his Legion used fake-psykers and are probably the most genetically compromised of all. Angron was obsessed with the injustice of his upbringing and the Emperor's arrival, but he himself was consumed by insensate futile oppression. The Emperor sought out all forms of greatness for all humanity but wouldn't hold even the slightest confidence in his own sons. Etc, etc.

Curze prided himself on being edgy and was consumed by his edginess
Pretty straightforward there, Curze was cursed
Jaghatai Khan gotta go fast and ended up going fast into the webway, I suppose that's ironic

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Jaghatai's irony is loyalty and neutrality. He was so impartial he may have doomed the Imperium, while also allowing warrior lodges in the White Scars against his own judgement. He cared for the White Scars above all else, and then also basically abandoned them, more abruptly than any other loyalist.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Great Khan has into space. Kurwa Webpath Elfs!

[sprinkled chariot]

I just clocked, if the Emperor finished the human webway, one might even call it the interweb, how secure would it be? How would the Imperium stop say, the entire Imperium getting invaded at the same time by nids who gained access to one web

If imperial navy did not have to worry about warp and did not keep losing ships to it(when something is described badass in BFG fluff, it quite often got cut out of space hulk 3-4 thousand years ago before 40k) and did not have to deal with perverted parody of itself made of GOTTAGOFAST ARCHEOTECH LANCE ARMED SUPER CRUISERS, which got lost to the warp.
Hivemind would have to search for nutrition sources without godsbane lance batteries, triple voidshields and archeotech plasma projectors shaping plasma into long range photon missiles.

[Kot]

I was being kinda sarcastic with the Golden Throne thing, nenjin, we all know how it turned out.
The Imperial Webway wouldnt be really that a problem since setting it up they would turn whole entrance on Webway side into a fortress possibly even bigger than the one outside - after all, Custodes & friends did have to hold an invasion out when Magnus screwed up.

Great Khan has into space. Kurwa Webpath Elfs!

Khan is space mongoloid, those dont use "Kurwa".

As for the Navy thing, note that the only Imperial entrance was on Terra and it was far too small for ships to pass (so they had anti-grav Rhinos and Land Raiders), I doubt Navy would be phased out completly, and even if Emperor were to set up an web of webway entrances he proably wouldnt link all planets, so Warp based ships would proably still crash around.

[My Name is Immaterial]

How would the Imperium stop say, the entire Imperium getting invaded at the same time by nids who gained access to one web

When it comes to 'Nids in the Webway, they did get in once, at the Battle of Duriel. The Eldar's response was to just blow up a gate, taking all of the Nids inside with it.

[pisskop]

speaking of earlier ironies

the imperium is about purity of humanity but natural beauty seems dead

the commoners are considered impure and mutated and filthily common

but the nobles of 'pure(r) stock' use surgery, augmetics, and various humanity/mind altering stims

in at least the material i have read or listened to it is rare to find natural beauty, and where it is its usually in landscapes and geology

i guess maybe its about humanity's mastery? not mastery, but domination.

[pisskop]

scrublords.  im physically imperfect, but im attractive to behold and, on an age where augmetics are still uncommon, more natural and more human for them

[Loud Whispers]

speaking of earlier ironies
the imperium is about purity of humanity but natural beauty seems dead

Beauty is not a necessary component of humanity, ugly people do not become subhuman for being ugly. Symbolically for example there is a lot of 40k fluff featuring empty statue pedestals. There were beautiful statues there once, but they were all melted down to provide more metal for basilisk shells. This is 40k, things were better once, but even the memories are dead

the commoners are considered impure and mutated and filthily common
but the nobles of 'pure(r) stock' use surgery, augmetics, and various humanity/mind altering stims

And rejuvenat treatments + illegal xeno augmentations, a good number of chaos sorcery too

in at least the material i have read or listened to it is rare to find natural beauty, and where it is its usually in landscapes and geology
i guess maybe its about humanity's mastery? not mastery, but domination.

Less humanity's domination and more its continual decline, 30k is its domination phase

Mechanicus is the most alien one to understand, because they see the human in machine, and the machine without human as evil

[Egan_BW]

scrublords.  im physically imperfect, but im attractive to behold and, on an age where augmetics are still uncommon, more natural and more human for them

yes, but are you shiny

* flexes glorious augmetic limbs

[Grim Portent]

A common theme in 40k is also that physical purity often hides spiritual corruption. See the Black Dragons novel, Death of Antagonis, for an example, the moral of that tale is that there's a time and a place for purity of deed, word and form, what matters is purity of purpose above all else.

Many of the most virtuous beings in 40k look monstrous to modern standards, often scarred, genetically and mechanically enhanced and with lives extended long past their natural end. People like Saint Celestine are rare exceptions.

It also plays into the general theme that humans have had to sacrifice their own humanity to survive in the 41st millennium. In a galaxy riven by war, disease, apostasy and rebellion being human is not enough on it's own, and the things that allow survival make you inhuman. To refuse augmetics, genetic enhancement, super soldiers made from tortured children, cloned vat slaves, expending human lives more readily than light battle tanks, mass serfdom and the practice of turning the dead or criminal into cyborg servants is to accept being overrun by Orks, devoured by Tyranids, exploited by the Eldar or slowly picked apart by countless hostile xenos species.

EDIT: There's actually a question occasionally asked in various forms in 40k novels that I rather like, 'is this worth it?'

Asked in rhetorical fashion by a human who fought alongside the Iron Hands to retake her homeworld from a Slaaneshi cult in the final steps of turning the planet to a daemon world. She decided at the end of the story that if the Space Marines from the story were mankinds defenders, then humanity had long ago lost the war.

Also asked by the protagonist of Death of Antagonis as part of his gradual realization that various monstrous acts he's performed are the only way for the Imperium to survive, and that he'll have to do far worse in time and accept that far worse happens elsewhere and must be so.

[Loud Whispers]

Also there's a great divergence in what the augmentations represent or serve as, same goes with mutations. A psyker story won't be the same as a null story or the story of a mutant uprising or genestealer cultist for example. Also on the mechanical augmentations there's gonna be a great difference between a story of a guardsman with bionic eyes, a noble who has augmetics that look perfectly human, a mechanicus adept that wants to show off their augmentations and so on. One of the more intriguing moments of human impurity is the Word Bearers HH novel, the first heretic I believe it's called, where the word bearers (who are still loyalist at that point) are crusading across the stars. They find a lost human civilization and to their dismay, find the nobles and a large number of the populace had modified their DNA to include xenos DNA. The word bearer space marine, a genetically enhanced superhuman, picks up a despondant human-xeno hybrid and wonders, why did they do it? What possible benefit did it grant them that it was worth it? That it was a space marine asking these questions and that they found no answers makes it so much better