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[Loud Whispers]

Wait, isn't one of the biggest emotions missing from the chaos pantheon in the 40kverse? Who gets fear? It's not Khorne, cos his demons don't feel fear. It's not Tzeentch, because he's all about hope, and probably doesn't get along well with those fearful of change. It's not nurgle because he's about jolly decay. Not slaanesh either cos he's all about excess and indulgence. I bet the Emperor eats all that fear

[Kot]

Nah, it's all of them. Nurgle is fear of getting hurt and mortality and response to it. Khorne is fear of being weak. Slannesh is proably fear of not getting enough cocaine, possibly fear of being ordinary. Tzzentch is fear of... not change?

It's quite basic emotion and I guess a lot depends on the source of fear, but I belive Nurgle is the most connected to it (I belive that this is one of his canonic minor aspects, Khorne gets a bit too) while Tzzentch is the least.

[spazyak]

slaanesh is fear of being lonely/failure at what you love/being incompetent or incontinent 

[Grim Portent]

Fear is a part of Nurgle's dominion specifically, as part of his despair and death aspect. The servants of the other gods can feel fear, but it is not part of their portfolio as it were.

[nenjin]

I think he's talking about actual gut crippling fear people experience seeing Chaos.

[PHILOSOFAGGOTRY, TEH SECOND REVELATION]

And from what I've seen, negative human emotions like fear, sadness and misery sort of equally nourish all daemons. Fear seems applicable to Nurgle since so many turn to him due to the fear of death, but that's not quite the same thing as "fear is my aspect." It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have a Chaos God of, essentially, water and or bread, because Chaos in general gets off on scaring people.

The reason no one really claims fear is that you can't do anything with it, as the person experiencing it. Rage, lust, scheming, deathless goo-i-ness, these are all things the "blessed" can use to further the work of the Chaos Gods or their own twisted agendas, as emotions they can both experience and inflict.

I mean, what good is a Chaos Champion that stands around knees quaking and shitting themselves as an act of worship? Or better still, what good is fear as an emotion if they experience it but then master it to do what they need to do (talk to a daemon, fight a space marine, etc....) Khornite Champions and Daemons don't win fights by going "Man I'm too angry, need to focus." Slaaneshi don't win by going "Fuck man this is serious, I need to sober up!" Tzeentchians don't win by going "Keep it simple, stupid." Nurglings don't win by going "I need to be presentable for this fight." (Ironically in weakly written 40k, this tends to actually happen. I hate it when Bloodthirsters suddenly get savvy and cunning and witty, or Tzeentch Daemons suddenly opt for a struggle of arms or Slaaneshi Daemons suddenly become as competent and sober as the story requires. Nurgle Daemons generally are the only ones that stay true to form. The fucking HH novels are rife with this kind of writing. Goddamn you James Swallow.)

In essence fear is just too simple, too basic, too important to the setting of Chaos to weave into a full god portfolio. It's the minor torment that no day is complete without, but in the end, the Chaos Gods all have bigger fish to fry. Really I think my point is: there's no ascension in the ways of Chaos through fear. No one in my memory has seized the power of Chaos with both hands because they're deathly afraid. They might DO something out of fear, but the emotion is quickly replaced by whatever the outcome of their behavior was. Get scared, murder a guy you think is going to murder you? You're in Khorne's Alley and bloodlust is the name of the game. Get scared and submit yourself to Nurgle? Now you're living the Unlife Fantastique and reveling in being unable to die. Get scared and eat a whole bunch of drugs to counteract it? Now you're up in the Hedonism and Drug Abuse Fun House and realizing you can beat fear by just experiencing something else. Get scared and call out to something to help you? Well, now you're in the Daemon Summoning Road Show, and there's nothing more destructive to fear than being empowered. Fear is a gateway drug perhaps to the wider Realm of Chaos.

I suppose if GWS had gone for a Chaos God for every day of the week, Fear would have its due. (Also I seem to recall that Malal may have claimed it? Or maybe that was Terror.) But I think it's smarter to have fewer gods with broader aspects. It's the devotees of Chaos and what they do with the philosophies they align themselves with that makes for interesting reading to me. (And why the Word Bearer's brand of Chaos is so mind-numbingly bland and repetitive. Because it's just "evil" and "Chaos-y".) Fear is just too easy to say it should be valid because you immediately go "Oh I terrorize people." But a good aspect IMO has to have applications outside of just making beings in the material universe miserable. Each emotion has to be both weapon and armor for its devotees. It has to have different applications depending on whether it's being given or received. It has to be deplorable and desirable on same level, both at the same time. And I don't think many people desire to live in fear, in pretty much any incarnation. They may take actions and hold beliefs that cause them to live in fear, but they don't do it because fear is their end goal for themselves. And if there ARE such people with a weird fear fetish, chances are they're numbers are so small at best they're represented by some mid-level Daemon in the Warp, not a full blown Chaos god.

And, if I'm honest, I've always felt that a Chaos God of Fear is the laziest form of Edge Lord Bullshit in 40k. Everything is already covered in spikes and skulls and screaming faces wailing the Song of the Damned. Half of everything is already night black and shadows. Your garden variety daemon already fits that profile. How in the hell do you make something even scarier than that without it becoming a parody of the concept? "Oh I stop people's hearts I'm so scary." Already have daemons that do that as a natural function of daemonry. "Oh I engulf whole planets in crippling terror until civil disorder and Chaos worship sets in." Shit, humans can do that without Chaos' help if they really want to. "Oh I'm like formless darkness and smoke and shit." I.e., the cantrip a lot of daemons open up with before they show their true form. It's just hard to claim Fear as iconic in a universe that is already this scary.

*flamer nozzles light and promethium starts rushing from tanks*

On the Chaos side of 40k, the genre is practically survival horror. The Chaos Gods have to step a level above that to be interesting and distinct in the setting. Khorne is visceral physical horror. Nurgle is straight up body horror. Tzeentch is scope horror (when the human mind perceives things far larger than them and breaks.) And Slaanesh is morality horror. Put another way, Chaos is a slasher film combined with a disease film, combined with a Lovecraft film, combined with a Dark Smut movie. What's common to all four of those movies? Fear for the protagonists. What kind of movie would you add to that line up that didn't feel redundant and dealt specifically with Fear? The Blair Witch Project? Every Horror Movie ever made where something stalks the main character throughout the movie?

Because if all you're doing is just scaring people real good before you kill them, then that makes you a bog-standard daemon in my book, and Daemons don't really experience fear except as a novelty.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Wait, isn't one of the biggest emotions missing from the chaos pantheon in the 40kverse? Who gets fear? It's not Khorne, cos his demons don't feel fear. It's not Tzeentch, because he's all about hope, and probably doesn't get along well with those fearful of change. It's not nurgle because he's about jolly decay. Not slaanesh either cos he's all about excess and indulgence. I bet the Emperor eats all that fear

Fear is the Emperor's sphere. Fear of change. Abnormality. Originality.

[Kot]

Fear of change is Nurgle stuff. There's a reason why Tzzentch is his enemy God.
Fear of abnormality, perverted a lot, is Slannesh. The point is that having eight tits is normal for Slanneshi cultists.
Fear of originality is would proably be Khorne. Despite what he has to work with, he has a raging hard-on for huge, organized armies that spill blood twice as effective.

If Emperor were to have a sphere, he would first have to be one of apocryphal Chaos Gods of Law but really, he's just a quite distinct force of Order but again, that was canon only years ago.

[Xantalos]

Truth be told you're right, nenjin, there isn't really a fear-based entity in 40k that would work effectively.

There is in Fantasy though: Nagash.
This is the dude that was so afraid of dying that he broke literally everything his people held sacred, murdered his brother, twisted magic into its practical antithesis by inventing necromancy, and eventually tried to kill everyone on the planet, including the Chaos Gods, all because he was afraid of dying.

Hell, the base mindset behind necromancy is one of fear - a budding necromancer is afraid of dying for whatever reason and will do anything to stave that off, whether that be shack up with vampires, eat crystallized dark magic, or try to ressurect Nagash himself like some twisted nega-GEOM as he sits on his black throne all skeletal-like in the mile-high evil fortress he built named after himself.

There would be a good way of making fear a chaosy emotion, I think - make it be the root of everyone who follows that god's actions, that they fear dying, fear becoming something other than themselves, hence why they don't follow other chaos gods. They want to stay themselves and will do anything to accomplish that, and the more powerful they become the more smug they may act but the more focused on self-preservation they become, since power comes with enemies. It'd be like a chaos god of ... well yeah fear, but selfishness? Almost feels like a cross between Tzneetch and Slaanesh. The god's actions would probably be centered around killing the other gods to prevent anything from ever being able to end it.

[Rolan7]

That's a good explanation and thanks for the WHF tie-in, but fear of death really seems like Nurgle's thing.

Whereas I'd attribute the opposite, fear of complacency, to Slaanesh.  Perhaps my New World of Darkness exploits have skewed my opinion, but the Daevas are always desperate for new experiences.  They take any vice (not just lust, though they're stereotyped as such) and have a burning need to play it out to the utmost.  But they're cursed to get bored of any experience, and need to seek different or... more extreme, expressions of said vice.

That's what I see in Slaanesh.  Does a warrior of Khorne ever get bored of blood?  No.  But even a wrath-obsessed slaaneshi would feel driven to new perversions, going from simple kills to mutilation, to stripping flesh, to erecting grisly totems, all while screaming new songs of hate.  Always needing more, something new. 

Weirdly I consider myself aligned with both Slaanesh and Nurgle.  I desperately need new experiences...  I'm never really satisfied for long (which honestly I think is normal for humanity).  And at the same time I'm terrified of long-term change.  I want to eat my cake then go back to having it.  I can't stay still, but I don't want to die.

But plans and wrath?  Creation and destruction?  They're both *enjoyable*, sure.  Sometimes very much so, and they're important parts of life.  But my conflicting fears of complacency and change...  take precedence.  Slaanesh and Nurgle.  I used to be all about plans and crafting, but that was years ago...

[nenjin]

I dunno if fear of complacency is quite the right term for overall what's going with Slaanesh. It might actually be fear of the truth. Consider that most addictions are unpinned by something, they're a response to something. Boredom, most obviously. But trauma, failures, hard realities, these are all things addictions compensate for. But it's not always fleshed out in 40k what those underpinnings might be for a Slaaneshi cultist. The pursuit of sensation is generally considered enough to talk about.

But through the fiction the message kind of comes through, usually in the most embarrassing way possible that is an example of what I hate about what I call "stock 40k writing." The message about Slaanesh usually shows itself when a Keeper of Secret's preening and threat completely melts away in the face of a Space Marine or another Daemon. As soon as someone actually stands up to a Keeper of Secrets (or cultist or whatever) of Slaanesh, they go from languid to a shrieking, butt hurt banshee, and usually get their asses royally handed to them. Fulgrim does that shit all the time in the HH. Slaanesh's servants are the only ones I can think of that routinely get embarrassed, or that actually seem to care about it.

In that sense, Slaanesh is kind of a poser. They're fine when they're in their element but take them out of it or present them with a situation they don't control and they freak the fuck out. The facade breaks down. Vulnerabilities are exposed. The inability to deal with problems "normally" is kind of the hallmark of addicts, actually. An inability to face real life as it is, not through layers of drugs and sensations and lies told to yourself. Slaaneshi would counter that real life lacks the contours and colors they need to survive....and it's likely true because they've made it true for themselves. You gotta use the logic of an addict when thinking about Slaanesh.

So in that sense I'd say Slaanesh's gig is the fear of reality. It comes across again and again in the fiction. Slaanesh often speaks to those who lack something due to reality and offers it to them as a demonstration of their power. Think Xeres in the movie 300 and the deformed Ephialtes. What does he do? Offer the guy no women would touch and no Spartan would respect both power and unconditional sex0rz. Going back to Damnation of Pythos again, Fulgrim offers Aldeberd (I think is his name) a rockin' body and control over his Knight, when he's spent the last 40 years of his life as a withered, drug-addled invalid. There's other generic examples. The rich noble who has tapped out literally every avenue for entertainment, and who fears complacency (as Rolan7 said) and trades their soul for the ability to transcend human experience. The woman who can't stand to get old and trades her soul for eternal youth. The man who is so insecure about who he is that he overcompensates in the other direction, glorying themselves to the point of absurdity, and they trade their soul for the majesty that deep down inside they know they actually lack. The guy who is so grotesquely overweight that in order to evade their shame, they turn their sloth into a virtue and an aesthetic and trade their soul for the absence of guilt. All the Chaos gods prey on the emotionally and spiritually vulnerable, but Slaanesh seems to make a habit of it more than most, because he targets things that simply are: the limitations of human sensation, the fact we age and become decrepit, the fact we are not as awesome as we wish we were, that we are the architects of our own prisons.

So Slaanesh is about the fear of the way things actually are. Khorne and Tzeentch are both kind of the fear of impotency. Khorne of course being about the masculine fear of being physically weak, and Tzeentch about the broader fear of being insignificant or unable to control your own fate. And Nurgle of course is the fear of death.

Man, that is why Nurgle is so awesome I think. His philosophy is both deep but also uncomplicated. Everyone fears death from old age and disease. It's universal among readers of 40k. Not everyone lives in fear of physical violence (which I'd guess 40k would have a lot fewer readers if more did) or is attracted to violence. And not all 40k readers really understand or connect with the theme of addiction and hedonism. But growing old and dying and the uncomplicated choice of damnation Nurgle offers is something everyone intrinsically gets.

[pisskop]

Ill stick with the idea that Id be most at home in a slaaneshi world.

Perfection?  sounds like me.
Selfish?  Sounds a little like me.
Corrupting ideas?  sure.

Im really more about moderation than excess though.  I subscribe to the idea that there is a time for many or most things.


Moderation is more tzeench trait if I see it right.

[Rolan7]

See, I think moderation's Nurgle.  Hypocritically, they go well together...  Like two shoulder daemons, calling for excess and restraint.
@Nenjin
Interesting.  I've only read a couple of the books, and slaaneshi weren't notably present in them.
While I appreciate the lore, I might stick with my headcanon.  I bet the authors are tempted to portray slaaneshi as fragile sexy posers, which I'd like to think might be a disservice.  Humanity's need for fresh experiences is more than that.  It's a burning desire which has fueled the arts, including engineering.  Creativity.  Like reliability, it drives the creation and destruction (for good or ill) of Tzeentch and Khorne.

It's based on insecurity, sure, but that doesn't mean weak.  It means desperate, as in strongly motivated.

[Arx]

I wouldn't have said moderation was a trait of any of the Ruinous Powers. Khorne is the killing rage unbound, Slaanesh is all the darkest fantasies and lusts unbound, Tzeentch is ambition and power lust unbound, and Nurgle is accepting horror unbound.

That's how it seems to make sense to me, anyway.

[nenjin]

Moderation is more tzeench trait if I see it right.

Mmmm, I dunno. Moderation = Control and Tzeentch is all about control on the macro-scale. Moderation could be seen as calculating and methodical and that's Tzeentch. On the other hand, he's also all about hubris and pushing boundaries and unrestrained change, which generally doesn't go with moderation.

See, I think moderation's Nurgle.  Hypocritically, they go well together...  Like two shoulder daemons, calling for excess and restraint.

Moderation does fit his chillaxness "no rush, everyone dies" lifestyle.

I wouldn't have said moderation was a trait of any of the Ruinous Powers. Khorne is the killing rage unbound, Slaanesh is all the darkest fantasies and lusts unbound, Tzeentch is ambition and power lust unbound, and Nurgle is accepting horror unbound.

That's how it seems to make sense to me, anyway.

This is also pretty valid in my opinion. This is, after all, completely vague pseudo-psychological/magical thinking to begin with. The occult is all about imposing patterns on reality.

I wonder if there's a really swank (and I mean SWANK, there's probably dozens of superficial ones) "Which 40k Chaos God would you serve?" poll out there on the internets that could answer these truly difficult questions for us.

While I appreciate the lore, I might stick with my headcanon.  I bet the authors are tempted to portray slaaneshi as fragile sexy posers, which I'd like to think might be a disservice.  Humanity's need for fresh experiences is more than that.  It's a burning desire which has fueled the arts, including engineering.  Creativity.  Like reliability, it drives the creation and destruction (for good or ill) of Tzeentch and Khorne.

No I totally agree; a lot of writers do the Slaaneshi side of it a disservice because there's a lot more gold to be mined there. Conceptually I think a lot of 40k writers just don't really get how to let Slaanesh shine when their chips are down. All the others get their moments: Khorne guys just get angrier and shit explodes. Nurgle gets Nurglier. Tzeentch just throws more magic at the problem or changes the rules of the game. Those are fine, those are all appropriate to who they are. But Slaanesh? They don't really have a response because "get more fucked up and weird with it" isn't a viable, actiony response to a problem, nor is "twist my nipple rings." Instead they get indignity and, as a bit of parting token fluff, they generally get off on being killed. And this problem kind of goes back a ways, even to the older 90s 40k. At best, they try to get their aggressors fucked up, maybe get them to pop a heretical boner but that's pretty much it. Slaanesh's brand of influence only works where there's specific weaknesses to exploit.

(And lately it seems like 40k has fallen into the habit of setting up traitors so you can spot from a mile away just for this purpose. This is quadruple-y true for Space Marines, since in the 41st Millennium if half a company of Space Marines turns to Chaos that's a major fucking heresy, and so it doesn't happen hardly often. You get 1 truly bad apple and maybe a couple accomplices, but any more than that and it's too much Heresy for your garden variety Space Marine novel.)

To tie up the previous thought, maybe it's Slaanesh's curse that, when you're that fabulous, that proud, there's no good way to go. You will always kind of look like a bitch when someone pulls you down from those heights.

[Arx]

Slaanesh is kind of fundamentally either indulgent (viz. Eldar) or escapist (some terrible hive world). It doesn't offer much in the way of actual power. All the others do, even if in the case of Nurgle it's "come at me, bro, I really don't care".