And this would prove once again that in the grim darkness of the far future there is only badass assholes ^^
Not to forget that some beings within the Inquisition think that killing the Emperor will led him to ressurrect as real god being. And from which other organization those individuals - who of course are considered as heretics by the rest of the Imperium - are from? ...Tadam, Ordo Hydra! Hydra Dominatus!
This is the kind of discussion I love . I will begin by stating I am huge fan of the Emperor (so, biased but I'll try to be fair), mostly because of the short story The Last Church, which is, to my knowledge, canon. Looking at the Emperor as the mysterious Imperial Official with his behavior, his attitude, and his willingness to sit down with this old man and not just talk but even debate when he could have simply destroyed the church and been done with it, speaks to some portion of his personality at least vaguely resembling human decency. It could be said, however, that he was merely hallmarking this moment with a kind of twisted mercy, maybe even dipping into a kind of megalomania given, after all, that it is the last priest of the last church on earth. More to the point, the Emperor's arguments draw on centuries of experience fighting the recent horrors of earth and he even goes so far as to reference the ancient struggles of mankind(crusades and such) that he never really alludes to having witnessed, though he does hint at having seen artwork that is lost in the 30k era. As far as his psyker level is concerned, well, he doesn't have one. That's like pegging one of the Ruinous Powers with a psyker level. He's not an A or A+ or even A+++. He's unique, an aberrant of his species and he knows it and has always known it. The Ruinous Powers all fear him and their underlings frequently reference him as the anathema: curse or even a kind of heretic, which continues into the 41st millenium. Keep in mind it takes the combined might of all four chaos gods, channeled through Horus (no slouch in his own right) to significantly wound the Emperor, which (according to current lore) due to whatever interference (Ollanius Pious or whatever) he responds to by obliterating Horus' soul which was currently 'possessed' by the Ruinous Powers. Regardless of the Emperor's true age (over 49 thousand years old or merely 11 thousand years old) or origin story he is simply the most powerful psyker ever born within the human race. A monstrous ego would obviously arise from realizing one had such power and the fact that he patiently assembles an army of super-human soldiers and attempts something even the combined nations of pre-Imperial terra failed to even imagine without millennia of internecine warfare and succeeds, speaks, at the very least, to his controlled and very much sane state of mind. Yes, the Emperor has issues, he is still human. He's the father/creator of twenty sons that are each a unique aspect of his own persona, a kind of fraction of his immense character and power distilled into a single, albeit immensely super-human, being. As far as his interactions with them, from what has been written by the amazing BL authors, he does his best. I won't deny that he makes mistakes and questionable decisions (Angron was so far gone by the time the Emperor arrived that he should have killed him himself), a fact that ALL of the primarchs are aware of and mention. They even go so far as to even speak of his particularly brutal actions when angered in hushed tones and clipped words (the fate of the 2nd and 11th Legions). Ultimately, the Emperor may not be the deity that humanity wants or even yearns for in the 41st Millennium, he's the deity humanity deserves. Of course, this is all my over-inflated opinion FOR THE EMPEROR!!!
Well, I can't tell you where I read a lot of this and only relatively recently learned it is kind of Apocrypha but the Eldar were the original combatants of The Old Ones but they blew it bigtime (obviously). They threw in with The Emperor (remember humanity wasn't really anti-xeno for a long time, only after the huge ass warp storms when The E conquered the Earth), and went on a rampage to reunite and become strong enough to beat the Powers (and I guess eventually the Necrons as well). After Horus fell The Old Ones lost their confidence in humans and considered the Astartes the greatest destructive force ever made... I know I read all this somewhere but I couldn't tell you where... I'll have to skim over everything in my black library to say.
The Emperor is... Nananananananah, Batman! Nice advocacy of the dude! What if both theory were actually right? If the most dangerous foes that a man may have to face are in fact his own demons, then the Emperor's ones must be truly terrifying! If I well remember my reading of Legion, what horrified Grammaticus wasn't the Emperor himself but his egoism, perhaps the only thing the god-like guy wasn't totally aware of - who could claim to know everything about himself nowadays? Whenever we realize something about ourselves, it in turn implies thousand other things that are yet to discover. If the unconscious expands exponentially as a function of our personal knowledge, taking into account that warp entities feed on this hidden part of our thoughts, then logically the Emperor has yet an inimaginable quantity of emotional energy - stored for millennia by an unequaled intellectual being - to deliver to the immaterium. That's the only way I can understand Grammaticus' fear of the Emperor's "egoism": while it would have been catastrophic to give from time to time the numerous warp inhabitants something of his thoughts to nibble - as any other warp related beings does -, this energy at least would have been fairly distributed between those creatures which in turn would have spent it on fighing against each other, as the four Chaos gods actually do. But because this hasn't been the case - and still is not - what would you think will happen when the Emperor dies? That's it: a single entity will absorb this immense amount of power and give life to a fifth god of Chaos, probably more powerful than the four other combined. What kind of super-god would that be? Some theorize that it would be one of order... A Chaos god of order? I don't think so, order was something for the living, something that the Emperor already embodied before Horus has struck him to death. No. It would no more be your humanistic and compassionate Emperor, but rather everything that millennia of war-fighting may have been suggested through this imperturbable noble face without being openly expressed: paradoxe and perverted vengeance, not quite who he was deep inside himself - actually just a man cursed by a greater intellect -, but how he was perceived by most who tried to divine his intentions - and naturally failed in this task. But, hey, there is already a god who possesses the same attributes! Malal/Malice, master of anarchy, feared enemy of the four others - who are not supposed to fear many things -, just like the Emperor! I think you've got my point
