What's the Point of the Horus Heresy Now?

[Volt]

So, we're essentially right at the end of the Horus Heresy story, with the Heresy series itself being concluded with only a few books remaining in the Siege of Terra.

 

What was the point of it all? Looking back on the Horus Heresy book series it was frankly, a bloated load of nonsense that utterly failed to grasp the basic thematic underpinnings of the concept of the Heresy itself. The whole point of the Horus Heresy is that it is a tragedy, a fall from grace - an epic of ruination and misery that lead to the 'current state of affairs' in Warhammer. 55 Books give or take the count of anthologies, yet the fall of Horus to Chaos took place in book two, and there was little to no sympathetic buildup either. The tension is completely blown at the literal start of the book series, leaving 53 titles that are more or less a pointless string of battles with threads that often lead to no-where and many characters do not even really have arcs to speak of. The Primarchs haven't changed much in the course of the series, they're still the same characters we know without changing their opinions. The marines are much of the same; the only room for growth that occurred were the mortals. Yut many of them were also part of the bloat and didn't add to what is supposed to be the main arc of the HH.

 

More crucially, the whole point of the Horus Heresy is that something was lost - a bright future shattered. Yet the Imperium of M30 is functionally no different from M41. Sure they may have been raving atheists at the start, but their dogma just had a different tune. The ends were still the same. Slavery was rampant, mass death was common, and the Imperium was still totally dystopic from the very outset. The whole point of the Heresy narrative is that something was supposed to have been lost, yet as we've seen there was nothing there in the first place. The only difference between M30 and M41 is that the Imperium is slightly more dysfunctional, but the government, quality of life, and daily routines are little different than that of the future. So the most crucial part of telling a tragedy is voided. Why is the reader supposed to care about the fights in the first place, when they're nothing more than action porn and serve no purpose for an actual thematic arc in the series, instead merely being part of a convoluted mess that has no idea what it even wants to be as literature. A tragedy is supposed to have the climatic downfall occur in the middle of the story, with everything afterwards being the process of all being brought to ruin, such as in Hellenic or Shakespearean plays modeled by Freytag.

 

 

Moreover there has to be some stakes to be actually lost. With the Black Library intent on making out the Imperium and Emperor as being rotten from the get-go tragedy cannot exist; there's no grace to be lost. Regardless of how the Siege concludes, the end result is that the journey from 30k to 40k is merely that of a plateau. The only real "tragedy" being technological regression, while both states being equally miserable hellpits no sane being would want to live in. It doesn't help either that much of the HH became marketed on Shyamalan style "twists", pushing sales and keeping fans buying up books by dropping hints at some revelation pulled entirely out of a writer's arse that doesn't make sense for the themes of the Heresy. I love the Dark Angels, but we don't need to know about the Hexagrammaton at all. More important than any space marines shooting each other is the emotional arc of the Lion, which we didn't even get because authors want to mask him in a memetic field of mystery - forgetting that mystery without characterization is just a writing crutch.

Instead we get nothing. Personalities jump and change under different authorship, over half of the series could be trimmed away as bloat, and the book series just ended up a slog showcasing how everything was already a miserable affair. Which might be an interesting story structure... if it had been planned from the start. Instead it tries to simultaneously cram the failures of empire as a theme, while simultaneously trying to justify said empire, while trying to tell a tragedy where we're supposed to care about said empire. The result being a mess of thematic intentions that are completely incompatible bar execution by a savant and merely promotes an intense sense of jadedness in the reader to feeling any empathy.

[Marshal Loss]

There's a lot of nonsense in the series but there are quite a few gems as well. The HH was a flawed experiment that clearly lacked a cohesive long-term vision but we still got a lot out of it, mainly thanks to the individual skill of certain authors, even if there were many many many missed opportunities. This is really just going to come down to perspective. You say that we don't need to know about the Hexagrammaton, for example, but some fans might disagree, desperately wanting every piece of information so they can portray the Dark Angels perfectly on the tabletop; you say that the emotional arc of the Lion is more important than Space Marines shooting each other, but we know that many fans happily thirst for the latter and continue to give BL their dosh. There are some novels I think are absolute toilet paper-tier trash yet they each inevitably have their committed fans.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, most issues come down to a lack of centralized planning and the desire to make some Legions/characters the sole domain of certain authors. There was clearly a period where the HH was thought of as nothing more than a cash cow and that definitely harmed the prestige of the series.

 

My own approach is just to focus on what I love and ignore the junk I dislike. When BL first started doing the HH I was against it, I wanted it all to remain a mystery. There are posts to that effect floating around somewhere on this very forum! Then for a time I backflipped and decided they might as well go all-in. Now I'm more conservative, albeit not as hardline as a decade ago; this time around I just try to enjoy the good bits.

 

But to address the title, what was the point of it? To 1) fill in the void containing the Imperium's semi-mythical past, and 2) to make BL a lot of money. It's as simple as that.

 

edit: grammar

Edited August 17, 2020 by Marshal Loss

[Noserenda]

Exactly what Marshal Loss said really and it suffered because of huge changes at Black Library/Games workshop as it rolled out over a relatively long period. 

I think your huge mistake is treating it as one story though, which it never really was after the first 5 or so books. Its a couple of dozen loosely related stories weaving around and away from each other to flesh out a setting rather than one basic narrative arc.

Oh and it also made Games workshop an awful lot of money.

[DukeLeto69]

IMHO the “mistake” BL made when they realised they were onto a commercial winner was to not reset and go back and do more books setting up the “fall”.

 

We know they originally intended the HH to be much shorter than it ended up being. Not sure anyone ever confirmed it but my guess was 9-12 books. In that context the fall of Horus is still too soon but better than it has ended up.

 

We did need to see “the good times” of the Great Crusade with Primarchs and Dad all a happy family. We needed to see Ullanor. We needed time to love the characters so we more keenly felt the loss when they fell to chaos.

 

I agree on tone and setting needing to be more noticeably different to 40k too. I think Horus Rising tries to do that (could have gone further) but the HH series soon started to become too similar/same as 40k.

 

Heck we the readers should have SLOWLY discovered about the warp, chaos and demons along with the characters - why didn’t Dad / the Emp tell us?????

 

I have enjoyed the journey and some books were truly amazing (particularly looking at you Know No Fear) but it lost its way and started to feel like a cash cow.

 

There was also, of course, the whole debate around whether the HH is a “STORY” or a “SETTING” and I think it flip flopped between the two.

 

Personally I would have preferred a core narrative, a spine taking us from A to Z (Ullanor to SoT) focused on POV of limited characters (certainly Horus and Emp or those closely observing them if not a direct POV) with ancillary/tangental story arcs fleshing out other events/factions that people could choose to read but do not have to.

 

But that’s me!

 

Edit cos full of typos - damn you little iphone keynoard damn you to hell! Lol

Edited August 17, 2020 by DukeLeto69

[SkimaskMohawk]

A big problem was that the series was supposed to be a total of 10 or 12 books at the start. The events leading up to isstvan 3 and horus' confirmed bad-guy status would have taken 25%-33% of the series. The middle would have probably been other key events like Prospero or whatever with the last few being siege related. Instead it meandered all over the place. Theres a good argument to be made that a lot of even the best books are unnecessary to the overall story; we know from the initial books that erebus (and by extension his legion) is evil, making first heretic kind of just trivia.

[b1soul]

A lot of gems on the bloated mess.

 

Yes, the most glaring weakness of the HH series is the underwhelming fall of Horus and the lack of strong characterisation of him or his legion after Horus Rising.

[Tyriks]

I don't think it's a fair assessment to say that 30k Imperium and 40k Imperium are essentially the same, either. A lot was lost in the Heresy - maybe the circumstances are superficially the same, but the Imperium in 30k was fundamentally different in that it was going somewhere. It was doing the same sorts of things as the "modern" Imperium, but it was doing them to achieve something, which will never be achieved now. The lost potential is indeed tragic (for those that believed in the Imperium, if not for us).

[Scribe]

I think the point itself, much as the plot...was lost. It became a Goose laying the Golden Egg. You dont finish such a thing, when you can spin off 5 Raven Guard books, and 138 Salamander books.

 

When the dust settles, it will be under 20 books that 'matter' in the grand scheme of the Heresy, but thats with 20/20 hindsight.

 

With appropriate planning, it could have been done in 12-15, and much much better, but it is what it is.

 

lol quote of the day for me applies to this as well!

 

"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."

Edited August 17, 2020 by Scribe

[Allart01]

It's hard to disagree, sadly.

With that said...

 

I don't want to sound dismissive, but you have to remember this is not *literature* in the sense you imply when referring to human achievements such as the greek or Shakespearean tragedies.

 

The Horus Heresy is a very complex tie-in product accompanying toy soldiers. You wouldn't have studio designers instead of actual writers, otherwise.

 

Now, you can like the project as much as you want (I do quite a lot!), but never forget what it is. That is the very essence of the proverbial "First step on the road to disappointment".

Edited August 17, 2020 by The_Bloody

[Scribe]

You are not wrong, but it could have been better than it was. Its as simple as that.

[Marshal Rohr]

Yeah, it’s not Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky so it’s not real “literature“ even though the authors are actual authors, went to school for writing, have books that sell enough copies to make the NYT Bestseller list. Think of the great authors of the past like Charles Dickens and Machiavelli, they didn’t write books for just for a paycheck. Do you think Homer would’ve ever stooped to including supernatural elements in his writings like the Warp and Chaos Gods? Of course not.

[Lucerne]

At this point, other than the works of French, Abnett, and ADB, the Heresy/Siege exists solely to provide source material for FW to wrangle into a coherent backstory later.

 

The irony is that for all the waffle, half the Legions- including the SoH- didn't even get adequate coverage of their actions.

Edited August 17, 2020 by Lucerne

[Rob P]

Does the dramatic structure really work over a 50 book series? Isn't it the requisite components and flow of a story or character arc within a story?

 

The weaknesses to me are execution rather than the overall stories being told over the vast quantities of novels.

 

I enjoyed the series even with a fair few hiccups at a novel level and the occasional character level (e.g. setting Loken v Aximand)

Edited August 17, 2020 by Rob P

[Allart01]

Yeah, it’s not Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky so it’s not real “literature“ even though the authors are actual authors, went to school for writing, have books that sell enough copies to make the NYT Bestseller list. Think of the great authors of the past like Charles Dickens and Machiavelli, they didn’t write books for just for a paycheck. Do you think Homer would’ve ever stooped to including supernatural elements in his writings like the Warp and Chaos Gods? Of course not.

This is... not my point.

Please notice that I never dismissed supernatural elements as a part of literature - but comparing the cultural and symbolic meaning of those in Homer(s)' work to the Horus Heresy is a little simplistic.

 

Since you bring out Machiavelli, I'll use him as an example.

On one hand, you have this author whose ultimate goal, in his most fortunate/widely known work, was the political reunification of the Italian peninsula.

On the other, you have the necessity to sell model kits.

 

I'm sorry, I'm not saying that the comparison is absurd*, but you are comparing apples to oranges, and that's where I think a lot of frustration comes from.

I don't want to sound too aggressive towards something I honestly love; but love means understanding and accepting something for what it is.

 

*it wouldn't necessarily be, in fact, especially when we return to Homer or other forms of epic.

The Horus Heresy could have been the start of a new modern mythology, like the Lord of the Rings was.

But it wasn't.

Probably for the structural resons mentioned above.

Edited August 17, 2020 by The_Bloody

[Marshal Rohr]

Models for the Horus Heresy didn’t exist for six years after the books were released. The last official Heresy table top game was out of production for almost two decades before Horus Rising was released. The Horus Heresy was very much intended to be a licensed fictional series independent of any games produced by GW at the time it was created. Which means if you have a problem with the HH, to be logically consistent you’d have to consider many of the most beloved and culturally impacting scifi novels of the last twenty years not “literature” either which is frankly laughable considering how many Star Wars books and other IPs have had their tie in fiction win actual scifi awards. You might not consider it literature, but Carrion Throne, Vaults Of Terra, Emperor’s Spears are all as powerful sci fi stories as the Expanse or Forever War Edited August 17, 2020 by Marshal Rohr

[Fedor]

There are already a few other threads going over this that were started before the Solar War came out.

 

I had my own criticism in some of those earlier threads, but the more i think about it the more i'm quite happy it ended up a huge bloated disorganized pulpy soup. It fits what 40k has always been perfectly and plenty of the books were enjoyable. aS long as they leave 30k open as a setting i think a lot of the gaps can be filled in well with a bit of thought. Give us some pre Horus Rising books, a Sons of Horus character/legion study or two...

 

This was never going to be some meticulously planned and structured one or two author vision thing. Most of those start going all over the place when the books pile up as well...Wheel of :cusse, Malazan etc..

Edited August 17, 2020 by Fedor

[Indefragable]

GW is clearly attempting to take after Marvel/Disney or DC these days. So don't worry, there'll be 40 reboots down the line. 

[Ishagu]

I think that the Horus Heresy series was ultimately a disappointment, and many of the books are utterly forgettable.

 

So much bloat, so much unnecessary side plot, and far too much Bolter porn across too many books that can be missed completely. That being said, I think it served to teach GW and BL a lot of lessons, and they gained a lot of experience from the whole thing. I think the new Dawn of Fire series will be a lot more focused and concise.

 

Here's the biggest problem, in my opinion:

 

Horus was a very interesting, very compelling character. His fall happened far too soon, and once it did he became just another villain. It robbed the series of a fascinating character, and it robbed us of the emotional tragedy we would have experienced if we had spent more time with him and had a chance to become more attached.

There are many stories where a hero falls, not just in 40k, and they are always more effective if the fall is gradual and slow.

 

Instead of the tragic character drama, we got 55 books of various battles and bloat. It should be noted that some moments are amazing, and some of the battles are truly incredible, but they should have been condensed.

[bluntblade]

At this point, other than the works of French, Abnett, and ADB, the Heresy/Siege exists solely to provide source material for FW to wrangle into a coherent backstory later.

 

The irony is that for all the waffle, half the Legions- including the SoH- didn't even get adequate coverage of their actions.

You forgot Wraight. The guy who ensured that at least one Legion got every bit as much coverage as they deserved and more.

[bluntblade]

Does the dramatic structure really work over a 50 book series? Isn't it the requisite components and flow of a story or character arc within a story?

 

Th weaknesses to me are execution rather than the overall stories being told over the vast quantities of novels.

 

I enjoyed the series even with a fair few hiccups at a novel level and the occasional character level (e.g. setting Loken v Aximand)

I wouldn't mind reviving the thread looking at how the series might have worked a bit more tightly - I think most of the problems came with the very baggy midsection, when the likes of Wraight, French and AD-B were at the periphery and the series had little real direction.

 

From that perspective, the series pulled itself back together with a vengeance in the late game.

Edited August 18, 2020 by bluntblade

[Scribe]

Yes, I was thinking about that old thread.

 

Someone should revise it.

[bluntblade]

Yes, I was thinking about that old thread.

 

Someone should revise it.

I meant the "comic book storytelling" one from back when I was thinking about the MCU's narrative shortcomings a lot. Edited August 17, 2020 by bluntblade

[Scribe]

Oh, I misunderstood. :D

[mc warhammer]

it doesn't work as a whole, but thankfully i never approached it that way

 

though, if the heresy series hadn't been created, i wouldn't be here.

 

on this board i mean, i'd still be alive

[Roomsky]

As has been noted, hindsight’s 20/20 and they didn’t really know what they were doing when this all began. Trying to make sense of the Heresy as an actual A to B series will only give you a headache, it’s turned into a setting like 40k whether it was the intention or not. Of course, I’m aware this doesn’t exactly address the issue that, fair for the time or no, Horus fell in two books. I can hardly blame anyone for being frustrated.

 

That said, the idea no primarchs have changed or have arcs just isn’t true. Perturabo, Jaghatai, Russ, Dorn, Guilliman, Lorgar, Vulkan, and Corax all have an arc that’s easy to track by reading their associated works, YMMV on quality of course. Fulgrim, Ferrus, Angron, Magnus, and Alpharius all get a one book arc or introduction before becoming a static character, true, but that’s still probably more than they would have gotten if it was an actual, concise series. The Lion, Curze, Sanguinius, Mortarion, and Horus are the only real victims of too many cooks being in the kitchen, which of course sucks but is hardly all of them.

 

Ah, but I do still dream of a universe where they didn’t pull a Disney and backpedal every time a book about the 1^st proved to be divisive.

 

So, uh, for narrative poignancy I totally get that the loss of an obvious golden age is probably the right call. But to defend what we did get:

 

1 - This is as much a failing of modern 40k writing trends as it is of the Heresy sliding into the grimdark. 40k’s been edging further and further into being reasonable in recent years and that’s only going to dilute the contrast you might have seen back when you compared a newly released Horus Rising to most of its 40k contemporaries.

 

2 - So the authors have spoken at length about the difficulties in turning an age of myths into a world that people can actually occupy. And, unfortunately for the big E, he’s an autocrat trying to reconquer the galaxy. There is no possibility of negligible hardship under the premise of the great crusade. There will always be those stepped on in a military-centric, hierarchical society (and I’d object to portraying one as otherwise but that’s a can of worms not for this forum). And, atop that, the Emperor is bringing his “illumination” to worlds that were isolated for centuries. Colonialism had an adverse enough effect on our world, imagine literal starships descending onto your society and declaring that it’s time for it to be completely assimilated into a system of values you’ve never heard of.

Of course, if they were going to go for a “the real tragedy was that it was all doomed from the start” they should have doubled down on it, as they clearly weren’t sure if that was the endgame at the start. So I’m not so much as saying it did work, but it could have. This of course all loops back into the debate about whether this time of legend should ever have been adapted at all, as it pokes holes not only in the cool mystery of it all, but also the logic of famous events even occurring. And if you hate that it was developed at all, or that it was developed in the way it was, or that it wasn’t as cohesive as it should be, I don’t really have a counterpoint. Hate away, but I suggest applying a liberal dose of headcanon to help you enjoy it more (Curze never kept Vulkan in a maze, what are you talking about?)

 

But I’ll never agree with the sentiment that it should have been like, 10 books. Because I never would have gotten Scars and Path of Heaven, Jaghatai would have been a supporting character at best. I never would have gotten the First Heretic and Betrayer, because there’d be barely any time at all for Lorgar’s journey or the tragedy of Angron in a straightforward narrative. Nor would we have gotten the last third of Hammer of Olympia, or an Alpha legion that got to grow beyond “they’re sneaky,” or Little Horus or Savage Weapons or Prince of Crows or After De’Shea or any other extraneous bit of fluff that gave more life to the setting than any narratively sound account of a codex entry. I got over 20 books I love to read time and again out of a bloated mess, rather than 10 which while probably more cohesive, realistically would have had bad entries that were made unskippable by the subject matter. Just look at The Beast Arises, I don’t have my favourite entries of that collected like the Heresy, I have none of it. The Last Wall has no re-read value outside of its series, and I don’t want to re-read the bad half of it so there’s no point.

 

TL:DR – “What’s the point of the Heresy now?” Same as 40k. It’s a place to tell stories.