Primarch Book 6 - Fulgrim

[R_F_D]

£5 says the narrator is Rylanor reminiscing in the bunker on Istvaan.....

[Knockagh]

On a different note, the lanes armoury are selling a crystal sword, which obviously must have belonged to Fulgrim!

 

Maybe in anticipation of the release??

 

http://www.thelanesarmoury.co.uk/shop.php

[R_F_D]

More information on the book here from Track of Words, really please to see the answer:

What I set out to do was to give the reader a good idea as to why Fulgrim might make the decisions he does early in the Heresy series (without actually foreshadowing anything in particular), and to show that even the darkest deeds might come from the best of intentions.

[Taliesin]

This is a frustrating quote:

 

 

ToW: How does the final product compare to your original concept? Has anything changed much from your first ideas?

 

JR: Not really. There are a few tweaks – character names, etc. – but nothing major. This was pretty much what I wanted to do. I wish I’d had another 10,000 words or so to play with, to build some of the characters up more, but I’m fairly satisfied

 

Irritating how the format is so strict for these Primarch "novels". The authors are given an express brief to stick to a short word count even though they're being sold at a huge limited edition price. A common complaint so far has been that there is a wish the story had been a bit more fleshed out and that clearly has to do with the word count. Just saying, for me this series would even more attractive if they were not necessarily limited to 200 pages.

[Knockagh]

Agree they are too short when your buying them at £40, which is what I’m doing, stupid me eh. I don’t mind short stories they can be great but pound per page is way out.

Having said that I’m enjoying the series so not overly complaining. I would have preferred all origin stories but can’t have it all my way.

Anyone notice that the advert in WD shows the trim on the book as gold but BL has metallic purple, last minute change of heart? Would have preferred gold, looks classier I think, personal choice.

[Taliesin]

My complaining about pricing aside, I am really interested in how this one unfolds.

Definitely getting the regular hardcover once that releases.

[Ascanius]

I wonder if they went for purple because Fulgrim's the only primarch for whom that would be appropriate, whereas there are others for whom gold would fit, and they wanted the books to look distinct?

[Marshal Loss]

When it was first put up on the website, it had gold trim rather than purple as well, so the WD was likely put together at the same time. I think they're just trying to make the books distinct; which makes sense, I think the purple looks good.

[Knockagh]

Guilliman didn’t have blue, the colours aren’t legion specific, again it’s a personal choice and it will be interesting to see it in reality, I just think purple is a little tacky for a top line book, thought the same of the red in Magnus.

[bluntblade]

It was good enough for the Roman emperors, it's good enough for a book

[Marshal Loss]

Nobody said that the colours on each book were legion specific. Guilliman was the first book in the series; decisions change. It's likely they decided to avoid repeating the same look.

[mr.crusader]

BTW, Magnus was red.

[Knockagh]

It was good enough for the Roman emperors, it's good enough for a book

LOL, you have a point. I’m sure it will look fine.

[Petitioner's City]

Also purple has a lot to do with the Phoenician city of Tyre. And yes, purple was, after certain blacks and blues, amongst the most expensive colours in history. 

 

 

The color purple has been associated with royalty, power and wealth for centuries. In fact, Queen Elizabeth I forbad anyone except close members of the royal family to wear it. Purple's elite status stems from the rarity and cost of the dye originally used to produce it.

 

Purple fabric used to be so outrageously expensive that only rulers could afford it. The dye initially used to make purple came from the Phoenician trading city of Tyre, which is now in modern-day Lebanon. Fabric traders obtained the dye from a small mollusk that was only found in the Tyre region of the Mediterranean Sea.

 

A lot of work went into producing the dye, as more than 9,000 mollusks were needed to create just one gram of Tyrian purple. Since only wealthy rulers could afford to buy and wear the color , it became associated with the imperial classes of Rome, Egypt, and Persia. Purple also came to represent spirituality and holiness because the ancient emperors, kings and queens that wore the color were often thought of as gods or descendents of the gods.

 

Sometimes, however, the dye was too expensive even for royalty. Third-century Roman emperor Aurelian famously wouldn't allow his wife to buy a shawl made from Tyrian purple silk because it literally cost its weight in gold. Talk about sticker shock.

 

Purple's exclusivity carried over to the Elizabethan era (1558 to 1603), during which time everyone in England had to abide by Sumptuary Laws, which strictly regulated what colors, fabrics and clothes could and couldn't be worn by different classes within English society. Queen Elizabeth I's Sumptuary Laws forbid anyone but close relatives of the royal family to wear purple, so the color not only reflected the wearer's wealth but also their regal status .

 

The hue became more accessible to lower classes about a century and a half ago. In 1856, 18-year-old English chemist William Henry Perkin accidently created a synthetic purple compound while attempting to synthesize quinine, an anti-malaria drug . He noticed that the compound could be used to dye fabrics, so he patented the dye and manufactured it under the name aniline purple and Tyrian purple, making a fortune in the process.

 

The color's name was later changed to "mauve" in 1859, based on the French name for the purple mallow flower, with chemists calling the dye compound mauveine. And that's how the elite royal color became widely available and affordable thanks to a young scientist's serendipitous experiment.

[Petitioner's City]

Also I should add in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, pink was also an utterly masculine colour, and used by elites. So whether it's purple or pink, the cover - and the legion's colours - fit. One study of the evolution of this in the past century is Jo Paoletti's Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from Girls in America. A (non-acadmeic) summary of this and other academic texts is to be found in the Atlantic:

 

 

Toward the end of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Jay shows up to lunch with his mistress and her husband in a pink suit. For modern readers, it's tempting to take his color selection as a sign of dandyism. Why would a man choose to wear the color of Mary Kay, breast-cancer research tie-ins and kitchen gadgets galore? When cuckolded husband Tom Buchanan criticizes Gatsby for wearing pink, he seemingly echoes the present-day assumption that pink is a feminine color.

 

But that would be imposing today's view of pink on the past. Buchanan uses the suit's hue not to discredit Gatsby's masculinity or virility, but his intellectual bona fides. He mentions it only when Gatsby's described as an Oxford man: "[buchanan] was incredulous. 'Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.'"

Buchanan's comments make it clear that men in pink meant something different in the 1920s than today. According to an interview with the costume designer for Baz Luhrmann's recent film, the color had working-class connotations. Only in the relatively recent past did pink acquire its feminine connotations.

"In the 18th century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery," says fashion scholar Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute Technology and author of several books on fashion.

 

Steele says pink was initially "considered slightly masculine as a diminutive of red," which was thought to be a "warlike" color.

However, the pastel shade has also long evoked "health (as 'in the pink') and youth." So writes Jo Paoletti in her book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America--one of the only books to examine the color's gender coding at length. "Young men and women might wear pink clothing; old men and women did not," Paoletti writes.

 

Paoletti says our great-great-great grandparents and their ancestors were more concerned about distinguishing children and babies from adults than boys from girls. "Pink and blue were suggested as interchangeable, gender-neutral nursery colors,' appearing together in many of the clothes and furnishings found in the baby's room"--similar to the hats hospitals often give to newborn.

 

By the late 19th century, however--and especially as Freud and other psychologists' theories of childhood development gained hold--parents began to differentiate their offspring's sex earlier on. As they did, some parents favored pink for girls and blue for boys, though Paoletti reports that wide variance continued for several more decades.

 

Steele says the French exerted an early, if modest, influence on pink's gender coding. Thus, as both she and Paoletti note, Louisa May Alcott's 1880 classic Little Women credits the French when Amy distinguishes her sister's newborn twins by giving the baby girl a pink ribbon, the baby boy blue.

For several decades, however, pink defied consensus. Based on a review of museum collections and other sources, Paoletti found pink baby gifts and even the occasional garment for boys or "baby brother paper dolls" into the 1960s, though "[t]hese examples are all clearly out of the mainstream. By the 1950s, pink was strongly associated with femininity."

 

Steele told me this view of pink was mainly "for young girls. ... It seems to be a kind of early gender coding that worked especially on young girls." As she wrote in her 1985 book Fashion and Eroticism, "The decade of the Fifties was characterized by an ideological emphasis on conformity, and by fashion images that were sharply age- and gender-specific."

 

Thus Betty Friedan rails repeatedly in The Feminine Mystique about the setbacks women experienced in the 1950s, compared to their gains and relative freedom in the two decades before.

 

Ironically, Paoletti thinks it was this very sort of feminist critique of mid-century gender roles that helped solidify the feminization of pink for girls and women. "Since the 1980s ... pink [has] become a strongly feminine color (probably because the women's movement connected it with traditional girliness so successfully)." As the turmoil of the 1960s gained strength, and young baby boomers began to question traditional gender roles, women embraced more "masculine" styles such as pants and short haircuts. For their part, men enjoyed the so-called Peacock Revolution, wearing their hair longer and more colorful garments.

Edited October 24, 2017 by Petitioner's City

[Knockagh]

Got the book this morning, purple is worse than I thought. Tacky, cheap and horrible looking. Really spoils the look of the collection. Actually horrible.

[Jarl Caldersson]

I don't know I don't think it stands out anymore than Magnus book does. Pert=metal, Russ=metal, Girlyman=metal, Magnus=EXTRA BRIGHT AND GLOSSY RED!!

[Knockagh]

The red Magnus wasn’t pretty either. But again personal choice being what it is the purple is terrible, looks like something my 4 year old daughter would have chosen in a maddening glitter and fairy psychosis.

 

Read the first few chapters and it’s ok so far.

[R_F_D]

Are you referring to the book or the cover?  The cover seems fine to me, the book is bright I'll admit.

[Knockagh]

The horrid purple in the otherwise very nice grey case. I like the art on the book except the purple coloured paper edges.

 

Anyways, more importantly how are others getting on reading the book. I’ve another chapter read at lunch still ok.... nothing captivating yet... Fulgrim is definitely a needy individual somewhat, surprisingly, lacking in self belief.

[b1soul]

I wonder what's the rationale behind the ~200 page limit, seems a bit low. Why not give the authours some room to play.

[Knockagh]

Agree, although I do like a short story, but given the subject of this series and the newness of the subjects a larger book would have made more sense to me.

 

Having said that some of the authors have written outstanding little books

 

It’s probably more down to keeping up a fairly relentless release schedule and not bogging authors down in any one book for too long

[mc warhammer]

hang on...so some people have this book now and we're discussing the colour of the covers? where are my spoilers dammit

 

 

 

i'm hoping to find one depiction of fulgrim (other than abnett's) from BL that i can enjoy.

[Knockagh]

I doubt this will be it. I’m trudging through the opening chapters. Finding it hard to focus on it. Admittedly I haven’t much reading time at the minute a few minutes each lunchtime but it’s not grabbing me.

 

Could be the purple putting me off....

[DarkChaplain]

i'm hoping to find one depiction of fulgrim (other than abnett's) from BL that i can enjoy.

 

I can't seem to recall Abnett ever writing Fulgrim himself. Sure you're not thinking of McNeill?