I think pisskop and I are on the same page. Before the HH was put to text, I was ok with the situation. It was Saturday morning cartoon villains, and that was ok because it wasn't trying to be anything but. They were just trying to sell games and have some badass iconic figures to do it, with some nice but ultimately inconsequential fluff to back it up. ("They used to be the good guys!")
But suddenly 40k starts trying to get literary and it has a lot of 'splaining to do, further aggravated because they. Keep. Building. Up. The. Emperor. The Perpetuals shit. The dream walking. The time and space fuckery. The "Just as planned." They should have stopped short of where they did. But that's what happens when you try to explain myth; it ends up sounding contrived as it continues to buckle under its own epic proportions.
Lorgar is wonder personified, basically.
I don't buy this. Him and the WBs have a pathological need to bow down to SOMETHING. Otherwise they'd have just made giant statues of generic ubermensch putting his foot on a planet's neck and called it good. But instead they need an icon, a figure, as the object of their worship. Otherwise they would have been the greatest proponents of the Imperial Truth.....but they weren't. They were its biggest naysayers by directly contradicting it. Put another way, there were far easier and less problematic targets of their "wonder" than the Emperor. It's Faith, not just simple wonder at the vastness of existence. The universe already offered plenty of that.
But we can all agree the emperor fucked over Angron.
Again another example of "Why exactly did you do this again, Emps? Why did you antagonize the guy you gene-bred to be a RAEG machine, who you knew was already even more doped up on the Butcher's Nails?" Emps gave weeks, maybe even months to the other Primarchs, to know them and meet them and understand them. Angron? He treated Angron in exactly the way necessary to produce the Red Angel. All according to plan, I guess? Right. The plan of the drafting team at the Black Library desperately trying to connect the dots of 40k's mythology to a 400-page novel.
The problem is you want to fix that, it would take a retcon to end all retcons. Something above and beyond retcons in scope and scale. A purge, if you will.
Oh I'm well aware of that. I'm just re-reading the whole series again right now and these moments, choices and justifications keep sticking in my craw. I can usually tell when an idea proceeds the rationale that underpins it.
Put another way: two guys making a movie are sitting together planning it out. Guy A goes "Dude we totally need fucking dragons in our movie."
Guy B goes "Yeah man, dragons. Wait, aren't we making a futuristic sci-fi space movie?"
Guy A goes "Yeah. But I had an idea. What if there's like, Space Dragons, who once lived on Earth and helped create humans as they're known today before they fucked off to the distant reaches of the galaxy, blah blah blah blah blah."
And Guy B goes "Fuck yeah man, dragons."
That's kind of what I feel like has happened in 40k, where the decision to have dragons was made 20 years ago and the attempt to explain it in a way that doesn't insult the reader's intelligence is only a couple years old.
Remember: If the Chaos Gods had killed the Primarchs Big E could have made more or gone without them. By corrupting them they came closer than they ever did to being rid of the Emperor.
Facts not in evidence. It begs the question why he made Space Marines at all when he could have just made legions of Primarchs. It goes back to the theory that the Primarchs were made from a not-infinite resource. (Be that the Emperor's own essence, the stolen power of the Chaos Gods, what have you.)
Also when are we going to learn about the two lost Legions and the Primarchs. Considering how fucked up the Traitor Legions are and their names are still remembered, and how fucked up some of the Loyalist Legions can be.....how bad did the lost legions and Primarchs have to be, to be literally scrubbed from history? Can you get much danker than Chaos corrupted and/or mutated? What, did he accidentally create Ork and Tyranid Primarch Hybrids?