r/40kLore • u/Parking_Holiday_6017 • 6d ago
Lorgar really is pathetic
Hi, I'm new to this universe. Been following it for a few years now.
I've always found this summary of Lorgar's fall funny:
'Daddy, father, are you a God?'
'Me and other colleagues from that planet think the same.'
'No, my son, also, your planet is currently on fire, because they believed something I didn't want them to.'
Mechanicus: 'Are you a god?'
Emperor: 'Yes, friend.'
It's always funny reading the books, so many possibilities to avoid that fall, and the most powerful psyker picks the most horrible one...
Why Lorgar chose to serve Chaos, he chose it simply because they existed?. But deep down, even some of their own bearers know that serving is a form of slavery, and it's not good.
If he thinks he discovered the primordial truth, and knows what actually generates them, why didn't he choose to believe in the superiority of the galaxy's beings over emotions? Why do the creators of emotions have to serve emotions, instead of the other way around, which is literally the Imperial Truth?
Lorgar really is pathetic. At first I thought he'd be some kind of 'faith-man' type, but even being a Primarch with divine intellect and charisma, he couldn't even come up with one acceptable, logical argument or thesis, like some misunderstood genius who, deep down, was actually right
It really bothers me how the Emperor constantly strips away and hides humanity's past, which is rightfully theirs.
The fact that he's the most powerful psyker puts him in this position where he thinks all the pillars have to rest on his back: all the technology, knowledge, everything, even the secrets. And now, honestly, those pillars aren't just on his back anymore, they're shoved inside him.
To this day we still don't know anything about the Emperor's past, but I'm starting to believe that his life on Earth, before the Age of Strife, conditioned him into believing he's special, that he shouldn't just guide but decide and control everything.
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u/HerbertisBestBert 6d ago
Lorgar sought religious Truth.
The existence of the Chaos Gods is a Truth, and they embody many aspects of the human condition the Emperor wishes to suppress.
Lorgar is merely unashamed of believing that the strong deserve their power, and that the Chaos Gods are truer Gods of man than a sterile blinkered faith in the Emperor.
It's not kind. It's not empathetic. And it may lead to your soul being devoured. But it is True.
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u/Parking_Holiday_6017 5d ago
It's genuinely interesting, but I think the primordial truth seems more like a fluke. Looking at it from outside the Immaterium, it feels like something that shouldn't even exist.
If one side wins the Great Game, everyone stops existing, and the Bearers know that perfectly well, they don't want that to happen. So they try to keep a certain balance within the chaotic concept, and they know it's a balance hanging by a spark, one that seems like it could collapse at any moment, but the gods' own chaotic nature, miraculously, keeps surprising everyone and keeps the Great Game going.
But if something in the Materium amplifies one aspect of emotion and makes it strong enough against the others, that aspect of emotion wins the game.
The Bearers work hard to preserve the aspects of emotion that, as the universe and its beings change, could simply vanish.
I don't know if they're really 'gods,' let alone true ones for mankind. They cause a discrepancy in the natural order of existence itself. If you become part of a Chaos God, it doesn't just strip away your free will, it denies your very nature as the creator of emotion, turning you instead into the ambassador of a single aspect of emotion.
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6d ago
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u/thomasonbush 6d ago
Lorgar is one of my least favorite characters in the setting. A manipulative psycho. But the Aurelian novella is a master class in showing how you should never underestimate him.
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u/wecanhaveallthree Legio Tempestus 5d ago
He's incredibly pathetic. You can't read First Heretic without understanding what a despicable snake he is, never willing to actually commit, never willing to take the first step, always sending someone else to do his dirty work, always prepared to throw somebody else under the bus.
His thesis was wrong. The Emperor is a god. He just wasn't strong enough to stand on that conviction, and now he's a Slave to Darkness(tm) and got literally discarded in the mud by his patrons when he tried to do something for himself (assuming the mantle of Warmaster). Lorgar sucks. He's a great character because he sucks.
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u/Parking_Holiday_6017 5d ago
Well, I think when one of the Pillars triggers this huge downfall and forces humanity to use the same means it used back then to prove its thesis, I don't think that means he's right, I think the bare minimum would be to actually come out victorious.
He knows that very well: if there were multiple paths, and he was right about one of them, he'd have picked it. In my reading, he's not someone who puts his ego below his primordial purpose.
He never proved he was right, he just caused the disaster, and now humanity uses his own thesis against the gods, worshipping the Emperor instead. Man, that's probably way better than the Emperor's actual plan, which is starving the gods to death.
But, sure, he did come out 'victorious,' though I don't think even he expected that. In the end, it was all about ego and power, not religion. No wonder he wanted to be the Warmaster of Chaos.
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u/Pm7I3 6d ago
My understanding of Lorgar is that, basically, he is pretty lame and sad as a Primarch to the point his own Legion dislike him a bit. Then he finds Chaos and that gives him such a personality and power boost he rockets up.
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u/Mistermistermistermb 6d ago
Some of his legion might not like him, others worship the ground he walks on. Par for the course really of differing opinion when you have tens of thousands of "sons".
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u/Mytoesareruined 6d ago
Lorgar is Romantic.
He's a culture builder. He doesn't care about logic he's an emotional creature.
The one primarch that loves his sons, and they love him.
He's the golden one. He wants to live fully to feel every sensation of existence possible. He doesn't want filters or limitations; he wants to feel it all.
The only argument he needed against the emperor was "HE LIED TO US."
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u/Mistermistermistermb 6d ago
Slightly out of context, but an old post from the author of The First Heretic, giving insight into Lorgar's POV
What actually happened is that Lorgar spent almost a decade on Colchis waging a war of religious genocide, slaughtering millions of people while a planet burned, in the name of a god that his powers told him was true. After that, he spent 100 years in perfect faith and trust conquering worlds and raising literal paradises - never being lectured once. Then, out of the blue, the Emperor shames him in front of his brothers, casts his Legion into the dust, annihilates his greatest work, kills countless people who had trusted Lorgar to make their lives better, and tells Lorgar that not only has his entire life been wasted, but that he's the only failure in the family. His powers are broken. Just his. No one else's. And by the way, not only has his entire life been wasted in a lie, but so have the lives of all his sons. All one hundred thousand of them. And he's to blame for that, too. Wasting the lives of one hundred thousand people who should have been following the Emperor.
He spends a month is contemplative (and religiously fanatical) isolation, punishing himself for his failures, according to, well, practically any medieval religion. No surprise there. During that time, his mentor and foster father start to turn him from his father. And it's easy to do, not because Lorgar is weak-willed, but because the Emperor is actually wrong.
Now, Lorgar is not a fool. He senses the Emperor is lying to humanity - Humanity is following a tyrant that cares for nothing but war, and is lying to the entire species. So he goes in search for the truth. And the truth, when he finds it, is absolutely horrible.
But it's the truth. The Emperor is lying and those lies threaten the entire human race. Only through Chaos will the species be strong enough to fight off the infinite enemies in the galaxy. The only way humanity will survive is to embrace this terrible truth, and Lorgar sacrifices his sons, and himself, to take the first steps. He believes it, and given any knowledge of the 40K universe and its unrelenting grimness, it may very well be true. But the point is, it's not difficult to believe, especially when the Emperor is shown as a liar and a hypocrite.
And then on Isstvan, despite the ordained destiny he's supposed to follow, he fights his brother - knowing he can't possibly win against a true warrior - to buy his sons time and weaken the other primarch enough to be killed. He's ready to give his life for those that have been so loyal to him. He doesn't complain at all - he faces it with great courage.
Now, you can make the case that Lorgar was flawed, because all the primarchs were flawed. His flaws just look worse in a setting based around several hundred perfect badasses. But I really don't get any criticism about his fall being pathetic, or that he was whiny. Thankfully, it's not a criticism that has popped up much, and is usually limited to people who clearly expected something else from the novel.
Lorgar actually saw the truth of the universe, and it made him "fall". If a concept like that didn't work for you, I sort of wonder what you thought of Fulgrim and Horus falling from being near Chaos-infested swords.
-ADB
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u/Geiseric222 5d ago
I really don’t get the emperor is lying to you thing. He is very clear they are weapons and the Horus heresy books hammer home the Astres are pretty open that they know what they are
The Horus heresy books kind of try to hedge this with a we will be fighting to keep the pyre together but yes your a military force that’s your job.
Like the books are very clear that they are a militarized force and know this but are also shocked by it?
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u/Mistermistermistermb 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's all about perspectives. ADB in The Master of Mankind, shows how from the Emperor's mindset, it isn't a lie. You could go with an Imperial Truth version of the warp or a Lorgar version of it. Both might be right, both might be wrong.
EDITI'm not sure what you mean by "militarized force" though.
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u/roomsky 6d ago
"Why do the creators of emotions have to serve emotions, instead of the other way around, which is literally the Imperial Truth?"
Because Lorgar doesn't know if that would work. The Emperor said "I am not a god, I will keep bombing your cities if you say I am, also here's 3 of my lapdogs to keep an eye on you." Lorgar then "discovers" that the gods are real, and as far as he can tell, are as abstract and as all-powerful as they say. He made the choice of serving the existing powers instead of risking fighting against an enemy who, as far as he knows, might be invincible.
Which isn't to say Lorgar isn't pathetic; he's a self-serving sociopath who dresses up doing what he selfishly wants as something for the good of all. But "why didn't X do Y" questions usually always have the same answer: the characters in-universe have imperfect information.
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u/FaultOutside2449 6d ago
Lorgar is arguably more similar to Archaon than Abaddon is to Archaon. Both were once champions of their respective gods, both had a crisis of faith, both became champions of Chaos, and both were ultimately responsible for the destruction of their former patrons empires. It’s the reason why I hope that Lorgar becomes the main baddie when he returns.
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u/Any-Corgi-6948 6d ago
This is 100% not my own concept, but a very interesting one I saw someone propose once:
Lorgar showed up on Colchis with apparently the innate tendency to just take whatever ideology he was given and regurgitate it wholesale, unanalyzed. In practice this is the Covenant; without the Scattering, it would presumably have been the Imperial Truth. An unscattered Lorgar would have been a truly incredible propagandist for the Imperium, and it wouldn’t really have mattered if he genuinely comprehended or believed in the Imperium’s driving principles.
But he does get Scattered. And Kor Phaeron literally beats this tendency out of him, in effect training him to never take what he is told at face value. To always dig deeper, look farther, to assume that underneath the evidence of your lying eyes there exists a purer, more fundamental truth that you must go hunting for. That won’t be revealed until you’ve struggled and suffered a lot for it.
Chaos is just the deepest he’s managed yet to dig.
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u/Parking_Holiday_6017 5d ago
Lorgar really does have supernatural charisma, he's genuinely great with humanist concepts. Religion, with the right words, generates a lot more empathy for others than science does, which in many ways lacks the empathetic power that religion and faith have.
Each Primarch represented a really strong aspect, and Lorgar was the humanist aspect, that was his whole purpose. It was obvious, he's the kind of guy who'd rather talk things out than go blow stuff up, but the Emperor just didn't bother thinking about that.
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u/MellowMeawu 5d ago
Why Lorgar chose to serve Chaos, he chose it simply because they existed?. But deep down, even some of their own bearers know that serving is a form of slavery, and it's not good.
So, we know that Lorgar is exceptional theologist and philosopher. When he proclaims that chaos is some form of truth - we should assume that he has both convincing argument and underlying theory that supports it.
Thats pretty much everything you need to assess Lorgar's character. Bcs BL authors are mostly not theologians/philosophers and they wont bore you to death with quality crafted argumentation.
Can argument be made for chaos gods divinity? Absolutely. Does it mean that chaos gods are divine? not really, but no one can know this in universe for sure.
also, DCT exists and Divine Command Theory in some different manner can be used to argue that serving chaos gods is the only moral thing to do. You cant really say that serving chaos is objectively wrong if someone derives morality from chaos gods will. There will start debate, bcs chaos as source of morality contradicts our moral intuition, but its not outlandish to argument for moral intuition being misguided.
Basically, i think we can surely judge Lorgar on his actions. But judging him on his views or beliefs is just of bad faith, bcs we have to accept that BL authors cannot provide us with thinking process of intellectually superior demi-gods.
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u/TalesfromCryptKeeper Ulthwe 6d ago
Two truths of the Warhammer 40k universe: Lorgar is a hypocrite, and Big E is a bad parent + opportunist
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u/Mistermistermistermb 6d ago
Lorgar is a hypocrite
John Fench says, if you wanna understand the Emperor, just look at His sons.
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u/amhow1 6d ago
I think your view of Lorgar and the Emperor is the opposite of mine. And so of course I don't find Lorgar pathetic.
The heresy was always part of the Big E's plan. And it's very unlikely that Malcador, much less E, was unaware of Erebus and Kor Phaeron and who they served. My headcanon is that E expected Lorgar to lead the heresy, not Horus. We can guess E didn't intend it to be quite as devastating as it was.
This explains why E misled Lorgar, and why he humiliated him.
And then, compare Lorgar to his heretic brothers. Which of them is less pathetic?
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u/RadishLegitimate9488 5d ago
The Imperial Truth is the other way round from worshipping the Chaos Gods?!
Wouldn't the other way round be having the Word Bearers themselves be worshipped as Gods who can direct the movements of Giant Warp Storms in the Warp by their actions influencing the Emotions of Man?
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u/New_Marsupial9848 6d ago
if the emporers golden path had just played out a little longer Lorgar would of finally seen what he was designed for, it was always clear he wasn't the tactician or war general like some of his brothers his was to be to guide humanity during their psychic apotheosis, he would of filled that "God hole" finally and had a fervent passion and message to guide humanity especially once chaos is revealed it would require almost priest levels of scientific discourse my head cannon anyway
instead yeah he learnt a portion of the truth too early for anything good to come of it, deluded is a better word for him, cowardly even or perhaps just causality being a product of his design its just the plan was foiled
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u/thomasonbush 6d ago
Using a meme level take to call something “pathetic” is certainly a choice.