Why Warhammmer 40K fans keep arguing about the Emperor’s terrible sons

polygon.com:

Warhammer 40,000 stands apart largely because of its vast scale. Billions of people are stacked in hive cities, trillions of people sign up for the Imperial Guard (and die horribly in the process), and quadrillions of humans are spread across the galaxy. That’s without mentioning the various alien races, known as xenos — terrifying space bugs, ferocious orks, awe-inspiring space elves, and immortal robot skeletons.

But that’s not what fan conversation tends to center on. If you check out Warhammer 40K fan spaces and content channels, you’ll find that much of the conversation surrounds twenty terrible boys and all the bad decisions they make. What’s up with that?

The God-Emperor of Mankind is the guy who set up the Imperium of Man, powers the lighthouse that all Imperium ships use to travel, and stops an endless horde of demons from breaking into Terra and exploding the planet. The God-Emperor sustained an ouchie 10,000 years ago that means he’s confined to the chair, a carrion lord who consumes a thousand souls a day. And it’s all because of his terrible sons — the Primarchs — and their nonsense.

The Primarchs and their exploits started as vague myths and legends, half-remembered from a lost age. These characters existed far back in history, and had no realistic bearing on contemporary gameplay — and their stories weren’t explicitly told. That was before Black Library, the prolific book publishing arm of Games Workshop, started putting out books about these boys. There are now dozens of books in the Horus Heresy series, detailing each Primarch’s exploits.

The various authors of the Black Library pull this off by writing the Horus Heresy series like a particularly nasty WWE-style feud, or a soap opera with constant