Was the Heresy Inevitable? Could the Emperor have won?

[Conn Eremon]

See? An improvement.

 

 

Seriously, that actually would have been cool to see.

 

And you do have a point. Webway would have been great and all, but it's nothing on its own. But we have no idea if it would have been on its own. That's just the next stage in the Emperor's plans that the Heresy interrupts indefinitely. We have no reason to assume it was the last stage, and any other stages are utterly unknown at this point.

[Wade Garrett]

That's true.

 

By themselves, neither a Webway nor the Imperial

Truth would have solved the Chaos problem.

 

And the Emperor had to know this. So he must have had more up his sleeve than that....it's just that we are very unlikely to ever know what that was, and given the butcher's bill for the parts of His plan we did get to see, I feel justified in being very skeptical of what was to come.

[The Red Thirst]

... meanwhile, as we debate, the Emperor is sitting on his throne thinking "Man, I actually have no idea what I'm doing"

Personally I'm of the "Just as planned" field of thought, after all why else would the Foul Gods refer to it as "The Great Game". The "Anathema" is just an unwanted player

P.S. Alpharius & Omegon have to get their secretive, plotting and scheming natures from somewhere, why not from daddy??

[Also congrats to Cormac on your elevation to Mod ]

[Marshal Rohr]

The Webway won't do a thing to solve the problems that made the Primarchs turn on the Emperor.

 

Magnus still has to sell out to Tzeencht to stop the Flesh Change.

 

Perturbato still feels like he does all the work and everyone else gets all the credit.

 

Lorgar is still seething over exploding cities and enforced atheism.

 

Curze is still Curze.

 

Fulgrim is still chatting with his awesome new sword.

 

Angron still rages against wearing the Emperor's chains.

 

Alpharius is still chatting with the Cabal.

 

Horus is still going to turn evil as soon as someone pretends to be one of his dead sons and shows him a vision of a future where nobody builds statues of him.

 

The only thing that changes is that the Death Guard walk out of the Webway to attack Terra as a normal traitor Legion led by a necromancer instead of an army of fat zombies.

 

Sometimes you say things that make me sit down and slowly clap at my computer screen. :D

[Brother Bovus]

This is a great topic, just btw.

 

I'm inclined to think that the Heresy, or some form of it, was inevitable.  Not necessarily at Horus' hands, but we know there are other very ambitious Primarchs ("Horus is not the only one who thinks himself the heir to an Empire").  Perhaps not 100% inevitable, but I don't think there would ever be a decent chance at the Great Crusade being completed successfully.

 

I think it all goes back to the Emperor's towering arrogance, which is a constant theme throughout the HH novels, and his attempt to trick/steal from the Chaos Gods in the creation of his sons.  That just stacks the deck SO much against his attempts to take over the galaxy.  He essentially (this is my understanding) united Chaos against him, giving them reason to work not just to mess things up, but explicitly to undermine his efforts.  I don't buy that he's sufficiently smart/resourceful to have planned everything out - it makes me think of the Joker in the Dark Knight.  Nobody has that much control over everything.  And given the inherent features of the university (warp-reliant travel and communication, the huge distances, etc), the Emperor, while incredibly powerful, can't control that much of everything.  He screwed himself, and his poor parenting didn't help.

 

On top of that, Wade Garrett is essentially correct that many of the primarchs are screwed from the second they were stolen.  Curze and Angron are just fundamentally broken.  Magnus had the deck stacked against him pretty much the entire time, and Lorgar's desire to be a sort of ur-philosopher king instead of a general would never have worked out (poor guy).  On top of that, plenty of loyalist primarchs COULD have fallen - who knows what would have happened if Sanguinius or Guilliman had been made Warmaster?  The Emperor made choices out of arrogance that doomed him, and by extension, the rest of us.