Emperor is unconditional critical love. He's obviously the best.
Unconditional. Except, you know, for the heresy bit.
Isnt slaanesh about embracing your defining attribuites to an extreme? the overweight gal in this example wouldnt by virtue of being a 'blind date', enpower slaanesh.,
but the slutty outfit and wet sloppy public indecency that followed might
Well the overweight gag is what makes it a Seinfeld joke. Costanza and Seinfeld getting worked up over it is what empowers Slaanesh.
[PHILOSOFAGGOTRY TANGENT]
Slaanesh is about pursuing the extreme of sensation. If lying around getting fat truly does it for you, if that's your deepest ideal of perfection....Slaanesh will encourage you to become as fat and lazy as possible, until that sensation alone is no longer enough and you start adding new things to your pursuit of sensation. And they'd make you the most fabulous 700 pound person laying on a pile of silk pillows and slaves ever.
Because I think another part of the hedonism angle is pride, which is what caught the Emperor's Children. Pride for a lot of people means being the best at something. The best fighter, the most comely person in the room, the most insightful etc...I think it's a basic human desire to want to be desirable to others. So if your defining attribute is horrible acne....chances are that is not something you're proud of, something you wish was different. And Slaanesh will help with that and take the sensation of pride and self-love to another level for you, by taking away your acne. (On the other side of the coin, Nurgle would be like "Bro your acne is baller. Imma make it even more baller.") And sort of like laying around being fat and lazy and self-indulgent eventually hits saturation point....so does normal definitions of beauty. And that's when Slaanesh gets weird with it. You leave behind conventional human ideas about pleasure, pain, beauty and aesthetic because they're simply not
enough anymore.
And then at the root of the Slaanesh philosophy is...selfishness and self-obsession. In some ways I think Slaanesh is the most human-oriented Chaos god because they get our flaws and how they make us tick and work on them in a truly subversive manner. Tzeentch I think is a close second.
Contrast Nurgle. Nurgle is not a god whose philosophy is based in selfishness. It's outward looking. So concerned with all that healthy, uninfected life! Nurgle doesn't care who you are or what's wrong with you. He has a copy of
Everybody Poops next to him and everyone is welcome to the fold. Nurgle presents a "utopian" ideal of equality in filth, where everyone shares the same thing at a basic level. While that plays to human idealism and our sense of belonging, I don't think equality itself is a basic human instinct. To me that sets Nurgle's philosophy a bit outside the universal human experience.
Khorne's philosophy captures the primal, destructive nature of the human spirit but in some ways I think he's the least tuned in to humanity of the four. (I guess that depends on your perspective. Since 40k is all war most just give Khorne his association to humanity by default.) But when you think about it, Khorne interacts with the smallest range of human emotions of them all. Rage and martial pride are a pretty small subset of the human condition. Berserking is in some ways losing touch with your humanity, losing touch with yourself and becoming the beast. It's not really an outward looking philosophy, beyond looking for the next thing to kill, nor is it really an inward-looking one because all that's inside you is the bloodlust. Death is the only real goal or outcome. An end to possibilities rather than the creation of new ones like the other three. Consider that this is why you rarely have insurgent Khorne cults in the fiction, versus the other three who all about insurgency. Khorne cults and their tenets and worship don't fit into the average human world very well. They just tend to destroy them. (All that said, some of my favorite 40k Chaos settings are ones that put Khorne's philosophy to interesting purposes, like in
Daemon World.)
Tzeentch comes close to being the God most attuned to humanity, if for slightly different reasons than Slaanesh. Tzeentch plays to our strengths as a species more than our weaknesses. Tzeentch's philosophy is simultaneously inward and outward-looking. You look to the self and to the universe for mastery and understanding. Ambition is what underpins Tzeentch's philosophy, and at least pre-Heresy that's probably humanity most defining, luminous trait. The philosophy is also somewhat of a meritocracy (and I mean that in the "survival of the fittest" sense, not the "fairness" sense.) The most knowledgeable and clever gain the most power. Tzeentch is empowered by our will and want to do and to grow and the lengths we're willing to go to do so. While Slaanesh might be a form of self-improvement, it's internal. It's not like, at a fundamental level, people's realities can be changed by the sensations you experience. Tzeentch however is self-improvement, on some level, that others can also experience, that is external. Your knowledge can be taught, your ability to read the future can change the course of history and your power can reach out into the universe and change the lives of others.
Tzeentch, like Slaanesh, understands that are our egos, their good parts and bad, make us incredibly vulnerable to their philosophies, whereas Khorne and Nurgle focus on the strength and frailty of our bodies as our greatest vulnerability. There's elements of the physical and the emotional in all the gods but they split along different lines. And to me, while dying violently would suck and rotting away and becoming a plague zombie would be revolting, somehow letting the Chaos gods get in your head and change who you are seems more terrifying to me. Nurgle and Khorne are more involuntary attacks on humanity. They kill people and spread plagues, and maybe some parts of humanity get off on that. But Tzeentch and Slaanesh are voluntary attacks on the human spirit because they leverage basic human foibles across the largest swath of our existences. They're the day to day evils while Khorne and Nurgle at the apocalyptic evils, and Tzeentch and Slaanesh seem more fiendish to me because of it.
*gets a bolt round to the back of the head while scribbling*
It's too bad there aren't more enjoyable Chaos books written. The late 80s and 90s had a lot of good ones that really allowed themselves to drill down into deeper concepts about the Chaos Gods and you really got to the philosophies under-pinning the beliefs. That's when 40k manages to tap into the Micheal Moorcock inspirations and become something more than just slash fic.
Chaos and the Four are treated fairly 2d dimensionally these days. Although maybe that's because I'm still reading the HH and it takes a innocent, ignorant approach to understanding Chaos. Still. I'd like to see more books about Daemon Worlds and the culture of what manages to live there. Because when you have to use Chaos as an actual setting, rather than just as a door-kicking action filler or horror show, it forces you to think about it actually would apply to life. Instead of just "blah blah kill you blah blah use your blood for rituals blah blah skulls on the wall eyes on the floor blah blah kill it with fire."
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