Each of the Warhammer 40k primarchs – except saintly, perfect Sanguinius, of course – has his own special cocktail of larger than life toxic male traits. They’re a pathetic parade of maladjusted demigods, intended to demonstrate a clear poetic lesson: use science to turn humans into gods, and all you’ll make is monsters. Some primarchs are cartoonishly evil, some are tragic, self-hating ogres, and some suppress their urges by being deathly dull (looking at you, Rogal). But one I hate most of all: the galaxy brain prince of the incels, Perturabo.
Games Workshop’s Reign of Iron narrative expansion, released in the runup to the now-impending Warhammer 40k 11th Edition, teased us with the prospect of the Iron Warriors primarch coming back, and even brought a new artwork showing his monstrous daemon prince form. So far, he’s still not shown up, but I’m convinced it’s just a matter of time.
Which is a bit of a conflicting thing for me. On the one hand, he and the Iron Warriors look very cool – gunmetal, hazard stripes, and chaos corrupted machinery never go out of style. But on the other, I’m really going to want to smack him in his stupid glaring face, and given that face now seems to be 20 feet tall and made of warp metal, I don’t fancy my knuckles’ chances.
Like I said, a lot of the primarchs are bastards. I save a special pit of hatred in my heart for Lorgar, too, the evil, sanctimonious, hypocritical, grovelling little twerp. “I’m always right, I just have to find new ways to be right every time I’m proven wrong.”
“Yes, I know all these things are objectively evil, but they’re the only option because my new philosophy I just made up to flatter my own intelligence proves it is so.”
“I don’t really want to do these evil things, but, you know – *points at book I wrote just now* – them’s the rules, my hands are tied.”
It makes me sick. No, with apologies to my great friend and writing inspiration, Alex McHugh, an inveterate Urizen-lover, I put Lorgar Aurelian firmly in the dickhead drawer. But even he can’t hold a candle to old Perty, because at least Lorgar, at some point, thought he was doing something good for reasons other than his own aggrandizement.
Lorgar’s pathological obsession with being right where others are wrong isn’t a virtue, any more than the atrocities it leads him to commit. But I find pathos and a scrap of mercy for him, partly because I read him as literally losing control of his sanity, and partly because, like fellow baddies Konrad Curze or Angron, he didn’t choose all his chains.
The lord of the iron fourth, by comparison, is an avatar of weaponized victimhood, utterly self-imposed suffering, and delusional deflection. From very early in his story, the two things he’s most conscious of, and most concerned about, are how incredibly clever he is, and how annoying it is that nobody else understands that. And he never, ever learns or changes.
Teenage Perturabo, in the Horus Heresy books, reminds me of 14-year-old me, when I’d just read The God Delusion and felt pretty certain that, if the world would just put me in charge, I could probably sort things out in a couple years. I matured to realize (and accept) how embarrassingly dumb that was. But Perturabo just stayed a pig-headed teenage blowhard forever, with the added complications of being a genetically enhanced superman, in charge of his own army.
Trauma can’t help explain the way he is, in my view. His adoptive father Dammekos exploited him, yes, but also raised him as a prince and warlord. He had a life of comfort and privilege compared to the likes of poor, mad, awful Curze, tortured plaything Mortarion, or enslaved puppet Angron.
More to the point, when you’re a 10 foot tall, immortal super-genius, ego-driven bitterness and desperation for approval really should be something you grow out of. It takes a very special kind of turd to be, in all sorts of ways, actually superior to everyone around you, and still allow a superiority complex to let you systematically hate and abuse them. But that’s what Perturabo does, forever, without ever considering the alternative.
There’s a very powerful passage in Hammer of Olympia, Guy Haley’s 2017 novella on Perty’s backstory, in which the primarch gets absolutely intellectually bodied by his adoptive sister Calliphone. She’s the closest thing he ever had to a friend, she’s very definitely the only living soul that ever liked him, and she has him utterly dead to rights.
Calliphone confronts him with the obvious truth that he’s a bitter, petulant ghoul, addicted to blaming others for his own dissatisfaction with the universe. She begs him to consider for one second that he might not be perfectly correct about everything. She even argues, eloquently and with a sympathy her foster brother hardly deserves, that accepting his own imperfection could free Perturabo from his endless, nihilistic misery and aggression. He feels one tiny itch of self-doubt at that and, out of pure, impotent fear, snaps her neck.
I don’t think anything conveys better than that how utterly, irretrievably disgusting this guy is, or how little he deserves anyone’s sympathy. To be clear, being an unremittingly bad person doesn’t make Perturabo a bad character – we covered that in my little treatise on Erebus.
It just makes me absolutely fucking hate his guts, and I will die on that hill. Or, more specifically I guess, I will lose every game I play against him when he inevitably comes to the tabletop, because I will drop all pretence of strategy just to bring that scrap-legged shit-spider down and trample on his worthless corpse.
For more of these highly journalistic ravings on Warhammer lore (or if you’re a diehard Iron Warriors fan coming to flame me), come along to the free Wargamer Discord community, where I road test a lot of these rants before they hit the website. See you there!
Source: Wargamer
