On one level, Warhammer 40,000’s Emperor of Mankind is a cosmic genius, a master of 5D chess who manipulates the strands of fate and fights an endless war against the machinations of the Chaos gods. On another level, he is a clown-shoes bozo who can’t move forwards without stepping on a rake. If you’ve read enough Warhammer 40k lore, the question will surely have passed through your mind – is the Emperor of Mankind an idiot?
In the Warhammer 40,000 timeline, the Emperor of Mankind is a distant and absent deity, capable of interacting with his subjects only through psychic visions that can easily be discounted as delusions or even the manipulations of Chaos. Much of what we know for certain about him comes from the Horus Heresy books.
Some of the Emperor’s most questionable decisions include:
- Creating the 20 Warhammer 40k Primarchs, nigh-immortal demigods with incredible power, massive egos, and a hunger for conquest.
- Creating the Space Marine legions, mass-produced super-soldiers with violent warrior cultures, no connection to mundane humanity, and the full industrial apparatus to create self-sustaining war machines.
- Knowing about the threat of Chaos, and not properly warning any of his sons about it, even the highly psychic Magnus the Red.
- Censuring Lorgar Aurelian, the most devoted of his sons and the one with the most obvious desire to serve a divine master, by blowing up his favorite city.
- Not attempting any form of emotional bonding with Angron, the most visibly damaged and potentially dangerous of the Primarchs.
- Not perceiving any potential issues with the World Eaters (a legion implanted with pyschopathy-inducing neural pain engines) or the Night Lords (torture-hungry terror troops).
- Making the first step of his plan to liberate humankind from the emotion-driven powers of Chaos “conquer the galaxy with the biggest war in our species’ history”.
- Not considering how the Space Marine legions would respond to the looming prospect of galactic peace and their own obsolescence.
One wonders what outcome he thought this plan would have if not to create immortal, Chaos-worshipping super soldiers. Having been born around 8000BC, he was definitely alive when Paradise Lost was the hottest thing in Western literature; never mind psychic foresight, he’d read the book the Horus Heresy was based on.
But there are reasons for his actions – some better than others.
It’s just how he was written
The Emperor’s plan really is as dumb as a bag of rocks, because the writers who first put it together weren’t writing a plot, they were writing a series of myths. The lore for the Horus Heresy was developed very slowly, with much of it fleshed out for the first time in the Index Astartes article series in White Dwarf magazine in 2000 and 2001.
Those Index Astartes articles told the early histories of each of the Space Marine legions, including how their Primarch met the Emperor and a few major events in the Heresy. The articles needed to work as snappy short stories, and were framed as fragments of mythic lore still available in the 41st millennium. They’re great stories for that purpose.
But this narrative framework was a real challenge for the Horus Heresy novelists. The events that occurred, and the choices that characters made, were already fixed, whether or not they made a lick of sense.
The 40k galaxy is absolutely awful
While “politically autonomous, self-sustaining military units” are a really, really bad idea for civil stability – just ask ancient Rome – the 40k galaxy is set up to make them look a lot more attractive.
The Orks are genetically incapable of peace, and even worse species were active in the aftermath of the Age of Strife, like the Rangda and the Slaugth. If you go deep enough into Forge World supplement books, you’ll find that the Space Marine legions’ victories weren’t a foregone conclusion in every campaign.
Pacifism isn’t an option in the setting, one of the reasons we argue that Warhammer 40k isn’t an effective satire of authoritarian militarism. The 40k galaxy is set up to create unending conflict ensure that players have reasons for their Warhammer 40k factions to fight on the tabletop, and because it makes for great pulp fiction.
Foresight is a curse
The Emperor is the greatest farseer of the human species, with the ability to reach far into possible futures and create plans accordingly. This gives him two weaknesses. First, he’s open to a classic irony of prophetic visions: by trying to change the future, he creates the fate he was trying to avoid. The Emperor perceived a window of opportunity that would allow humankind to avoid being consumed by Chaos – and in attempting to pursue it, he helped to create the whole mess of the 41st millennium.
The second problem is that, when your gaze pointed to the horizon, you can’t see what’s at your feet. The Emperor is a big picture guy, but when the ‘little details’ are the emotions of demigod warlords who command legions of super-soldiers, that blindspot has massive potential problems.
The Emperor never had a plan
This is an idea put forward by Malcador in The End and the Death, the final book of the Siege of Terra series: the Emperor was always winging it. The Golden Throne was cobbled together from ancient relics and scraps of lore; the Space Marines were an effort to salvage what he could from the Primarch project when they were scattered through the warp; the Great Crusade was a mad-cap dash to unify humankind before the coming Chaos apocalypse he foresaw.
Viewed one way, this make the Emperor as dangerously rash and foolhardy as he was powerful – some of the other Perpetuals saw him this way. Viewed differently, he was ingenious, resourceful, and relentless – which is how Malcador saw him.
The Emperor moves in mysterious ways
While the jury is out on whether or not the Emperor is a god, in the final showdown between the Emperor and Horus we get to see the metaphysical warfare he is capable of. He fights a multidimensional and metaphorical battle against an unfolding god, and he still has room for nasty gutter tricks.
This power level squares the circle between his supposed genius and his boneheaded moves. Just as “god moves in mysterious ways” can reconcile literally any event with a religion’s concept of god, the Emperor’s status as a nigh-divine entity means his plans are made on a far higher level. Of course they don’t make sense to us: even if he explained them, we couldn’t understand them!
Yeah, but is the Emperor an idiot?
Yes! While some parts of his plans can be justified by the nature of the 40k universe, he still makes terrible choices – mostly in his parenting style – which are deeply avoidable, even without the benefit of knowing how the story unfolds. The Emperor is an idiot. But he is a very, very smart idiot. Genius and idiocy are not mutually exclusive.
Want to check out some more light-hearted 40k lore? Check out this lore guide to Space Marines who absolutely love bath-time.
Source: Wargamer
