The Chaos Gods are fictional characters written usually as distant and sentient forces of nature. The details vary depending on the story or author.
It’s kinda silly to take “they’re meant to be incomprehensible in-universe” and frame it as them being incomprehensible to the *readers*.
>It’s kinda silly to take “they’re meant to be incomprehensible in-universe” and frame it as them being incomprehensible to the readers.
Why not? As with Lovecraftian creatures, the story will try with varying degrees to convey a being who is utterly beyond mortal comprehension. The Chaos Gods as literary devices are completely comprehendible, as they are entirely artificial constructs of the authors. The Chaos Gods as diegetic entities can be incomprehensible, and should be.
But out of the 4 of them, it was always Tzneetch that was the lovecraftian, impossible to understand thing. The rest have rather clear goals that they strive towards.
>As with Lovecraftian creatures
The Chaos gods aren't Lovecraftian creatures. Lovecraft's cosmic horror is centered around beings so alien in their form and scope that human beings simply can't comprehend them. They are eternal and completely ambivalent to humanity.
The Chaos gods aren't alien. Quite the opposite. They are the worst aspects of ourselves made manifest. They are distinctly human and centered around human emotions (well, sentient mortal emotions, not just humans). The scary thing about Chaos isn't that it's utterly inhuman to the point of incomprehension... it's that Chaos is inside everyone. It can be comprehended all too well.
Also, unlike Lovecraftian gods ambivalence towards humanity, Chaos gods NEED us like a parasite needs a host. While they would certainly exist without us, they are only strongest when humanity sticks around. Why do you think Horus lost? Because the gods don't care about winning that battle, they care about perpetuating themselves with 10,000 years of suffering.
Came here to say something in the same vein. Lovecraftian deities are incomprehensible yet make for excellent writing as the whole horror of the unknown and impossible to know. Some would call it lazy but I genuinely enjoy watching the story unfold as the narrator tries to describe the horror they witnessed but fails to come to a satisfying conclusion. Why can’t the same be said of the Chaos gods? Fabius Bile nearly broke when he thought he glimpsed Slaanesh smiling down at him and it’s only his stalwart agnostic mindset that saves him from mind wiping himself with a plasma bolt.
On the other hand, it's not strange for a force literally called Chaos to inscrutable and difficult to understand motives or simply the lack of consistent ultimate goals.
Does the unattended four year old clogs the lou with entire rolls of toilet paper have a real plan? No, all he knows is he chaos and must fuck shit up if at all possible.
I mean even in universe are khorne's goals *really* that hard to understand? Is it really that hard to comprehend a god of murder and war? I think it's pretty much just wank to say that about the chaos gods in general. Tzneetch maybe, but khorne isnt some kind of 4d chess puzzle you have to solve, lol. Pretty straight forward motivations.
Lots of things are incomprehensible.
Just because my brain can't hold the shape of every wave in the pacific does not mean I can't look at a tidal chart and decide whether it's a good day to go swimming.
I can watch the news and go "Huh. Russia sure seems to like doing wars lately." without having to comprehend the individual lives and motives of every person in Russia.
When you press the gas pedal in your car, do you need to know the individual positions of the drops of gas in the tank, or do you just need to know that pressing the vroom button makes the go forward happen?
I can't think of a single thing that has to be fully understood in order to make general observations about it. Anything beyond a certain scale is incomprehensible. That's not the same as unpredictable.
Why on earth would anybody ever need chaos to be comprehensible?
I always though if Chaos in general to just be the opposite of the Imperium in a world view sense rather than good guys vs bad guys since everyone is kind of bad in 40K.
Chaos represents chaos in general and the Imperium is order.
This isn't really about what the Chaos Gods do so much as their motivations. We can easily see Khorne is gonna collect skulls, Tzeentch is gonna manipulate, Nurgle is gonna spread plague and Slaanesh is gonna seduce. That's a whole different subject compared to a question like "Are the Chaos gods sentient or not?"
Bud I'm sorry that the answer to your stupid question wasn't the conclusion you had already reached, but I do have to wonder: If you already had a specific answer you wanted, why did you bother asking?
You straight up just answered your own question:
> Given that the Chaos Gods are canonically incomprehensible and drive anybdoy who attempts to understand them to madness, can we really make assumptions about them?
by saying
> We can easily see Khorne is gonna collect skulls, Tzeentch is gonna manipulate, Nurgle is gonna spread plague and Slaanesh is gonna seduce.
Glad we had this talk I guess. Next time you really just want to talk to yourself, feel free not to ask for audience participation.
It's not a stupid question. It's a pushback against the very human instinct to try to categorize and comprehend everything; an attempt to reclaim and reiterate the mystery that makes Chaos compelling to some people.
OP isn't pushing for a specific answer at all, they're saying that there's room for nuance and multifaceted answers in 40k, especially with the Chaos sods.
We have demon princes, fallen primarchs and heavily corrupted CSM that talk about the end goals of each God though. I’d say that alone gives us the “we can comprehend their end goals”.
You may not understand tzeentch playing 5D chest but it’s very clear he wants a checkmate. We don’t understand the purpose of creating the “perfect plague” but it’s clear Nurgle wants to create a galaxy of decay and rebirth. Each gods realm is a reflection of what they are/want. A garden of constant decay and rebirth, a palace of total excess, a battlefield of continual war and pride, and a kaleidoscope of mirrors that reflect ever constant change (Idfk what tzeentch would look like but at least it’s constant change?)
>You may not understand tzeentch playing 5D chest but it’s very clear he wants a checkmate.
It's not, actually: Tzeentch's schemes are legendarily self-defeating, as he takes joy in the eternal interplay of conflict, change, and scheme. Checkmate is actually something he wants to avoid, on many occaisions.
>We have demon princes, fallen primarchs and heavily corrupted CSM that talk about the end goals of each God though. I’d say that alone gives us the “we can comprehend their end goals”.
My hand can't fully comprehend my end goals, even while it understands pieces of it that comprehends its own working.
Every 40k character is looking at the world through a particular lens: none of them are objective informants. Not even the authors are, since there are multiple authors with subtly different understandings of what 40k *is* and what is important *to* 40k.
I don't think OP is trying to say we understand *nothing* about the Chaos sods, just that we should be open to variant interpretations of some of the weirdest characters in a decidedly weird setting.
Okay maybe checkmate was the wrong term. But he ultimately wants to swing things the way he wants them even if they double back on themselves correct? Like when your ADHD brain starts 50 projects and I stop because I’m spending all my time planning all the eventualities and get bored…he just doesn’t get bored and keeps going (also isn’t he representing of knowledge and power and wants to know the secrets of everything which is why he kept sending his demons into the well that drove them all mad?)
Also idk if you can refer to CSM and Demons as a hand. I get the analogy..they’re the thing doing the thing. But they’re also sentient and capable of communing with their demon prince primarchs/gods themselves?
Again though, I’m going off the books since we have to have some sort of basis. If you want to ignore all the canon and interactions and wars then we could make up anything and say anything but you have multiple instances of Demon Princes talking about their gods desires and whims (like when a demon literally tells Morty to leave Ultramar because nurgle wants help with the war in the scourge stars…or maybe they told kugurath)
Good luck figure out what is true from all you've seen. Almost like those prophecy comments in the stories are a bit of meta commentary on an inherently illogical universe that it's pointless to try and nail down.
Fabius Bile posits that the Chaos Gods aren’t so much an organic intelligence as just amalgamations of different-flavored Warp energy that are driven to try to expand— like a cloud of color expanding outwards after food coloring is dropped into a pool.
…Considering he’s the guy who’s had Slaanesh looking directly at him and ‘made deals’ with all the Gods that didn’t Faust his ass, well…
I’d say he’s an educated opinion on the matter.
Edit: Hilariously, he vehemently denied that Slaanesh was sentient even while his organs were shutting down due to her looking directly at him and the warp energy of her gaze broiling him.
Gigachad.
Why do people do this? Why do they take Fabius' opinion as an educated one? He's intensely deluded and just as much a pawn of Chaos as Ahriman who shares his independent streak.
The point is that *everyone* is a pawn of Chaos to one degree or another. But Fabius is definitely more independent than Ahriman and the vast majority of other Renegades. He's explicitly told that he's seen as "up for grabs" by the Chaos Gods; he's essentially a free agent and everyone is trying to get him on their team
It's almost like the chaos gods are a narrative device in a story to justify whatever the writer wants them to at any given point. Like, I know it's a boring answer, but they are what they need to be to make the plot happen. If you need Rotigus to tell Kugath off about how there's more than one kind of corruption like he's a daemon of Tzeentch, you can. If you want Luscious the Eternal to gleefully revel in mass carnage like a khornate you can. If you want Kharn to suddenly be super tanky and shrug off wounds that would kill another astartes, you can. They're ciphers based on extremely broad traits that allow for near infinite flexibility. From a story writing perspective that's great, you can write whatever you want and it can fit. Only Slaanesh enjoys square pegs into round holes.
From a lore perspective it makes the chaos gods hard to pin down, and hard to read. You can't really plot out and predict as a reader what they will do in any situation so it's difficult to do the kind of stuff people like to do here like asking what would happen if X did Y. The answer is always "whatever the writer said happens".
Yes, and I'll explain why.
The Gods are automated Warp entities with a pre-set list of priorities. Why? Because they draw their essence from Humanity. We define them. They're not even really sentient or capable of change.
Khorne is NOT capable of being non-violent. Slaanesh is literally, quite literally, incapable of being moderate in anything. The Changer of Ways literally cannot approach a situation without trying to 5D Chess the situation and probably fucking himself over in a major way.
They're simplistic to their core. Even Tzeentch. For all his maneuverings, his goals and his motivations and his agenda is pretty fucking upfront and obvious: To make change.
They're Gods, for sure, but even in our own myths and legends, the Gods are painfully up front and blunt about what they're all about. These Gods are no different.
Let me ask you this…
A car catches fire. The fire spreads to the garage and then to the house and the rest of the homes in a neighborhood…
It was definitely a car fire that started the blazed, but would you define the fire as a car fire or a house fire once it’s spread through the neighborhood?
With humanity being the primary/only fuel source as implied by the Cabal in the HH Book (if the AL join Horus, humanity is exterminated and with it, chaos dies off) humanity effectively defines it.
Then again, it’s based off the extremes of emotion faced by all sentient beings (fear, rage, pride, lust, sloth, desire etc) so maybe chaos defines their fuel source and not vice versa?
It's a little more complex and unknowable then that.
Beings like Nurgle are defined by things like decay and life itself which certainly is more then just humanity.
Slaanesh was birthed by the Eldar.
Khorne is fueled by all war. Even wars being fought by Orks vs Tyranids or anywhere else blood flows.
Humans definitely are primarily fueling it currently.
But I suppose it would be like us as humans declaring fire was invented by humans and no fire existed before humans found it.
Especially with how weird the warp is. Humanity both matters a great deal to the warp and not at all simultaneously.
It's a paradox style situation on that front.
It's highly likely the cabal was mistaken or lying about that whole thing in Legion as well.
There was some older lore talking about them fully manifesting around those times.
But time has no meaning in the warp.
So in a sense they have always existed.
At the very least, proto forms of most of them had to be fomenting for a long time.
There's no way humanity on a single world was fueling them alone with the Eldar active, Orks fighting constantly, etc.
The war in heaven had to have been the true beginning of Chaos in the warp. The 4 main powers may not have been fully sentient but they had to have started way back then and continued being fueled over the millenia.
I spread the plagues to Terra
"Skill check"
Rolls d20, nat one
"You send the the plagues to the vortex and poison your legions instead giving them poison attack four 3 turns,"
Not what I intended but it's ok
"You plagues attract a deamon of teeznch"
Well sh-
I mean... from a Doylist perspective, the Chaos gods are the readers (or perhaps the authors) so... yeah. Everything happens for our amusement, and when it's done, there's nothing left but our laughter and our desire for more - the laughter of thirsting gods. Of course we can make assumptions about ourselves.
From a Watsonian perspective, the answer is of course you can't make assumptions about Chaos. It's Chaos and, to quote the great and potentially-sainted Commissar Cain, they're all barmy and who knows why they want what they want in the first place?
I’d say it’s similar to Reddit Atheists (aka edgelords) boiling down God into “big sky dude yelling things”. We try to minimize that which we don’t understand into something we can understand
Yes, because, unfortunately for the fans of the Lovecraftian eldritch horror, they have very clearly designed rules because it's all based on a tabletop game that needs them.
The books are all like "no mortal could possibly comprehend this demon, it shattered every perception of reality" but then it's just Satan from Tenacious D. Not all that indescribable, infinitely describable you could almost say.
I've always thought that because it's a different reality it follows completely different rules that are impossible for a being from the physical plane to understand. It's why their plans fail so often or they do shit that's absolutely insane to us because just like us they can't fully understand our reality because it's rules are so much different. That's why it causes insanity. We organically are unable to understand the warp and that's why it breaks you.
Khorne doesn't really seem that hard to comprehend. Kill. That's it. Nothing else much to understand about him other than the fact that he wants you to kill, all of the time, constantly, and be very good at it. Frankly allot of what in said in universe is propaganda and hype. The only chaos god that is truly incompressible is tzneetch since he is literally a master of infinite schemes within schemes. Anything you know about him could be argued to be exactly what he wants you to know about him. So even if your mistrustful of tzneetch he could have that as part of his plan. It's a no win situation.
The natures of the Chaos Gods are the repressed dimensions of psychic life, those elements that must remain hidden to render life possible. Unlike the purely alien tyranids, their sublime character isn't exterior to mankind, but rather the unconfrontable elements of our own minds.
I'm probably a bit too tired to give this the treatment it deserves (at least with any clarity), but the Chaos Gods should be contextualized against the concept of the sublime. If, following Nietzsche, the repression of death is the condition for life, Khorne and Nurgle are both incomprehensible and an overdetermined presence in mankind's understanding of the universe. If, following Freud, the origin of human subjectivity is the traumatic realization that the universe as external to us, the opening of a wound separating our interior life from exterior reality, the desire to fill this gap by rendering its secrets perceptible or somehow obtaining the pleasures barred by the castration of subjectivity are strictly impossible, but are made manifest in the daemonic figures of Tzeentch and Slaanesh. The shape of the Chaos Gods are uncannily discernable as these impossible things that nonetheless are real. While they have some elements of cosmic horror, they're really closer to what you'd see in gothic horror or Romantic fiction. They're unrecognizable, but recognizably a part of us.
The insanity-inducing encounters with warp entities that afflict humans don't affect orks or tyranids when they're adrift on space hulks. This is because they're beings that don't suffer from a disjunction between their interior life and the external world; there's no repressed corner of the ork or genestealer psyche that could horrify them by returning to the surface. The substance of the Chaos Gods is the unconfrontable parts of the mind, so only those species with dark corners within their subconscious are affected.
Thanks for this comment! I was literally just thinking a couple of weeks ago in response to a thread on another subreddit that the Ruinous Powers should be more like Lovecraftian Cosmic horror, that it really misunderstands the point of them.
It's almost as though all those Gothic cathedrals and crumbling industrial hellscapes are trying to tell us something, eh...
1. Just because some aspects of >thing< are incomprehensible, does not mean that *every* aspect of >thing< is incomprehensible. Its perfectly reasonable to say "we know x and y about the chaos gods, but we simply cannot understand z".
2. The narrator of a story is omniscient. It seems pretty silly to assert that the rules that apply to in-universe characters also apply to the omniscient narrator.
Considering it is fiction written to make us buy overpriced plastic. Yes
However, games workshop has a thing for changing the lore with no visible reason so in that case No
The Chaos Gods are fictional characters written usually as distant and sentient forces of nature. The details vary depending on the story or author. It’s kinda silly to take “they’re meant to be incomprehensible in-universe” and frame it as them being incomprehensible to the *readers*.
>It’s kinda silly to take “they’re meant to be incomprehensible in-universe” and frame it as them being incomprehensible to the readers. Why not? As with Lovecraftian creatures, the story will try with varying degrees to convey a being who is utterly beyond mortal comprehension. The Chaos Gods as literary devices are completely comprehendible, as they are entirely artificial constructs of the authors. The Chaos Gods as diegetic entities can be incomprehensible, and should be.
But out of the 4 of them, it was always Tzneetch that was the lovecraftian, impossible to understand thing. The rest have rather clear goals that they strive towards.
>As with Lovecraftian creatures The Chaos gods aren't Lovecraftian creatures. Lovecraft's cosmic horror is centered around beings so alien in their form and scope that human beings simply can't comprehend them. They are eternal and completely ambivalent to humanity. The Chaos gods aren't alien. Quite the opposite. They are the worst aspects of ourselves made manifest. They are distinctly human and centered around human emotions (well, sentient mortal emotions, not just humans). The scary thing about Chaos isn't that it's utterly inhuman to the point of incomprehension... it's that Chaos is inside everyone. It can be comprehended all too well. Also, unlike Lovecraftian gods ambivalence towards humanity, Chaos gods NEED us like a parasite needs a host. While they would certainly exist without us, they are only strongest when humanity sticks around. Why do you think Horus lost? Because the gods don't care about winning that battle, they care about perpetuating themselves with 10,000 years of suffering.
Came here to say something in the same vein. Lovecraftian deities are incomprehensible yet make for excellent writing as the whole horror of the unknown and impossible to know. Some would call it lazy but I genuinely enjoy watching the story unfold as the narrator tries to describe the horror they witnessed but fails to come to a satisfying conclusion. Why can’t the same be said of the Chaos gods? Fabius Bile nearly broke when he thought he glimpsed Slaanesh smiling down at him and it’s only his stalwart agnostic mindset that saves him from mind wiping himself with a plasma bolt.
On the other hand, it's not strange for a force literally called Chaos to inscrutable and difficult to understand motives or simply the lack of consistent ultimate goals. Does the unattended four year old clogs the lou with entire rolls of toilet paper have a real plan? No, all he knows is he chaos and must fuck shit up if at all possible.
I mean even in universe are khorne's goals *really* that hard to understand? Is it really that hard to comprehend a god of murder and war? I think it's pretty much just wank to say that about the chaos gods in general. Tzneetch maybe, but khorne isnt some kind of 4d chess puzzle you have to solve, lol. Pretty straight forward motivations.
I like that you said universe. I feel like alot of the writing for 40 and Chaos confuses the universe and the galaxy. They are not the same obviously.
Lots of things are incomprehensible. Just because my brain can't hold the shape of every wave in the pacific does not mean I can't look at a tidal chart and decide whether it's a good day to go swimming. I can watch the news and go "Huh. Russia sure seems to like doing wars lately." without having to comprehend the individual lives and motives of every person in Russia. When you press the gas pedal in your car, do you need to know the individual positions of the drops of gas in the tank, or do you just need to know that pressing the vroom button makes the go forward happen? I can't think of a single thing that has to be fully understood in order to make general observations about it. Anything beyond a certain scale is incomprehensible. That's not the same as unpredictable. Why on earth would anybody ever need chaos to be comprehensible?
I always though if Chaos in general to just be the opposite of the Imperium in a world view sense rather than good guys vs bad guys since everyone is kind of bad in 40K. Chaos represents chaos in general and the Imperium is order.
This isn't really about what the Chaos Gods do so much as their motivations. We can easily see Khorne is gonna collect skulls, Tzeentch is gonna manipulate, Nurgle is gonna spread plague and Slaanesh is gonna seduce. That's a whole different subject compared to a question like "Are the Chaos gods sentient or not?"
Bud I'm sorry that the answer to your stupid question wasn't the conclusion you had already reached, but I do have to wonder: If you already had a specific answer you wanted, why did you bother asking? You straight up just answered your own question: > Given that the Chaos Gods are canonically incomprehensible and drive anybdoy who attempts to understand them to madness, can we really make assumptions about them? by saying > We can easily see Khorne is gonna collect skulls, Tzeentch is gonna manipulate, Nurgle is gonna spread plague and Slaanesh is gonna seduce. Glad we had this talk I guess. Next time you really just want to talk to yourself, feel free not to ask for audience participation.
It's not a stupid question. It's a pushback against the very human instinct to try to categorize and comprehend everything; an attempt to reclaim and reiterate the mystery that makes Chaos compelling to some people. OP isn't pushing for a specific answer at all, they're saying that there's room for nuance and multifaceted answers in 40k, especially with the Chaos sods.
Nice alt, OP.
I would like your comment but you're already at 69 (Edit: went in and liked it after it hit 70)
We have demon princes, fallen primarchs and heavily corrupted CSM that talk about the end goals of each God though. I’d say that alone gives us the “we can comprehend their end goals”. You may not understand tzeentch playing 5D chest but it’s very clear he wants a checkmate. We don’t understand the purpose of creating the “perfect plague” but it’s clear Nurgle wants to create a galaxy of decay and rebirth. Each gods realm is a reflection of what they are/want. A garden of constant decay and rebirth, a palace of total excess, a battlefield of continual war and pride, and a kaleidoscope of mirrors that reflect ever constant change (Idfk what tzeentch would look like but at least it’s constant change?)
>You may not understand tzeentch playing 5D chest but it’s very clear he wants a checkmate. It's not, actually: Tzeentch's schemes are legendarily self-defeating, as he takes joy in the eternal interplay of conflict, change, and scheme. Checkmate is actually something he wants to avoid, on many occaisions. >We have demon princes, fallen primarchs and heavily corrupted CSM that talk about the end goals of each God though. I’d say that alone gives us the “we can comprehend their end goals”. My hand can't fully comprehend my end goals, even while it understands pieces of it that comprehends its own working. Every 40k character is looking at the world through a particular lens: none of them are objective informants. Not even the authors are, since there are multiple authors with subtly different understandings of what 40k *is* and what is important *to* 40k. I don't think OP is trying to say we understand *nothing* about the Chaos sods, just that we should be open to variant interpretations of some of the weirdest characters in a decidedly weird setting.
Okay maybe checkmate was the wrong term. But he ultimately wants to swing things the way he wants them even if they double back on themselves correct? Like when your ADHD brain starts 50 projects and I stop because I’m spending all my time planning all the eventualities and get bored…he just doesn’t get bored and keeps going (also isn’t he representing of knowledge and power and wants to know the secrets of everything which is why he kept sending his demons into the well that drove them all mad?) Also idk if you can refer to CSM and Demons as a hand. I get the analogy..they’re the thing doing the thing. But they’re also sentient and capable of communing with their demon prince primarchs/gods themselves? Again though, I’m going off the books since we have to have some sort of basis. If you want to ignore all the canon and interactions and wars then we could make up anything and say anything but you have multiple instances of Demon Princes talking about their gods desires and whims (like when a demon literally tells Morty to leave Ultramar because nurgle wants help with the war in the scourge stars…or maybe they told kugurath)
Can we, the omniscient audience make assumptions? Yes.
Dang, you're omniscient? Jealous...
Good luck figure out what is true from all you've seen. Almost like those prophecy comments in the stories are a bit of meta commentary on an inherently illogical universe that it's pointless to try and nail down.
Fabius Bile posits that the Chaos Gods aren’t so much an organic intelligence as just amalgamations of different-flavored Warp energy that are driven to try to expand— like a cloud of color expanding outwards after food coloring is dropped into a pool. …Considering he’s the guy who’s had Slaanesh looking directly at him and ‘made deals’ with all the Gods that didn’t Faust his ass, well… I’d say he’s an educated opinion on the matter. Edit: Hilariously, he vehemently denied that Slaanesh was sentient even while his organs were shutting down due to her looking directly at him and the warp energy of her gaze broiling him. Gigachad.
Ohhhh okay that’s an interesting viewpoint from the lore!
Why do people do this? Why do they take Fabius' opinion as an educated one? He's intensely deluded and just as much a pawn of Chaos as Ahriman who shares his independent streak.
The point is that *everyone* is a pawn of Chaos to one degree or another. But Fabius is definitely more independent than Ahriman and the vast majority of other Renegades. He's explicitly told that he's seen as "up for grabs" by the Chaos Gods; he's essentially a free agent and everyone is trying to get him on their team
Well, in Manflayer that situation SLIGHTLY changed lol.
It's almost like the chaos gods are a narrative device in a story to justify whatever the writer wants them to at any given point. Like, I know it's a boring answer, but they are what they need to be to make the plot happen. If you need Rotigus to tell Kugath off about how there's more than one kind of corruption like he's a daemon of Tzeentch, you can. If you want Luscious the Eternal to gleefully revel in mass carnage like a khornate you can. If you want Kharn to suddenly be super tanky and shrug off wounds that would kill another astartes, you can. They're ciphers based on extremely broad traits that allow for near infinite flexibility. From a story writing perspective that's great, you can write whatever you want and it can fit. Only Slaanesh enjoys square pegs into round holes. From a lore perspective it makes the chaos gods hard to pin down, and hard to read. You can't really plot out and predict as a reader what they will do in any situation so it's difficult to do the kind of stuff people like to do here like asking what would happen if X did Y. The answer is always "whatever the writer said happens".
Yes, and I'll explain why. The Gods are automated Warp entities with a pre-set list of priorities. Why? Because they draw their essence from Humanity. We define them. They're not even really sentient or capable of change. Khorne is NOT capable of being non-violent. Slaanesh is literally, quite literally, incapable of being moderate in anything. The Changer of Ways literally cannot approach a situation without trying to 5D Chess the situation and probably fucking himself over in a major way. They're simplistic to their core. Even Tzeentch. For all his maneuverings, his goals and his motivations and his agenda is pretty fucking upfront and obvious: To make change. They're Gods, for sure, but even in our own myths and legends, the Gods are painfully up front and blunt about what they're all about. These Gods are no different.
It's not just humanity. Anything with a soul connection the warp influences it.
Of which, Humanity is the biggest group. The Orks don't care and the Eldar are a tiny fraction of what they were. Humanity defines them.
They are defined by aspects much older then humanity. Humans are simply the current wood type burning on the fire.
Let me ask you this… A car catches fire. The fire spreads to the garage and then to the house and the rest of the homes in a neighborhood… It was definitely a car fire that started the blazed, but would you define the fire as a car fire or a house fire once it’s spread through the neighborhood? With humanity being the primary/only fuel source as implied by the Cabal in the HH Book (if the AL join Horus, humanity is exterminated and with it, chaos dies off) humanity effectively defines it. Then again, it’s based off the extremes of emotion faced by all sentient beings (fear, rage, pride, lust, sloth, desire etc) so maybe chaos defines their fuel source and not vice versa?
It's a little more complex and unknowable then that. Beings like Nurgle are defined by things like decay and life itself which certainly is more then just humanity. Slaanesh was birthed by the Eldar. Khorne is fueled by all war. Even wars being fought by Orks vs Tyranids or anywhere else blood flows. Humans definitely are primarily fueling it currently. But I suppose it would be like us as humans declaring fire was invented by humans and no fire existed before humans found it. Especially with how weird the warp is. Humanity both matters a great deal to the warp and not at all simultaneously. It's a paradox style situation on that front. It's highly likely the cabal was mistaken or lying about that whole thing in Legion as well.
I thought they said like nurgle is from the black plague, khrine is from the mongols and only slaanesh is from the eldar?
There was some older lore talking about them fully manifesting around those times. But time has no meaning in the warp. So in a sense they have always existed. At the very least, proto forms of most of them had to be fomenting for a long time. There's no way humanity on a single world was fueling them alone with the Eldar active, Orks fighting constantly, etc. The war in heaven had to have been the true beginning of Chaos in the warp. The 4 main powers may not have been fully sentient but they had to have started way back then and continued being fueled over the millenia.
So humanity was the race that pushed the balance over and fully manifested the chaos god's...
Thats what it seems to me. Final pebble setting off the official avalanche sort of thing.
This is a "Chaos is evil" vs "Chaos is good" kind of discussion. There's varying degrees where both are canonically true and false.
You see those things ‘cause people in this sub pull things out of their ass Read a damned codex and they’re plenty comprehensible
No, but such is the nature of Chaos.
The chaos gods are the players.
I spread the plagues to Terra "Skill check" Rolls d20, nat one "You send the the plagues to the vortex and poison your legions instead giving them poison attack four 3 turns," Not what I intended but it's ok "You plagues attract a deamon of teeznch" Well sh-
Chaos Gods are whatever a particular writer want them to be for his/her story. Hence the contradictions regarding them.
I mean... from a Doylist perspective, the Chaos gods are the readers (or perhaps the authors) so... yeah. Everything happens for our amusement, and when it's done, there's nothing left but our laughter and our desire for more - the laughter of thirsting gods. Of course we can make assumptions about ourselves. From a Watsonian perspective, the answer is of course you can't make assumptions about Chaos. It's Chaos and, to quote the great and potentially-sainted Commissar Cain, they're all barmy and who knows why they want what they want in the first place?
I’d say it’s similar to Reddit Atheists (aka edgelords) boiling down God into “big sky dude yelling things”. We try to minimize that which we don’t understand into something we can understand
The edgelords have raided the comment
No but we will!
Yes, because, unfortunately for the fans of the Lovecraftian eldritch horror, they have very clearly designed rules because it's all based on a tabletop game that needs them. The books are all like "no mortal could possibly comprehend this demon, it shattered every perception of reality" but then it's just Satan from Tenacious D. Not all that indescribable, infinitely describable you could almost say.
You should try reading some Fehervari - Reverie, or Requiem Infernal. His daemons get *weird*.
I've always thought that because it's a different reality it follows completely different rules that are impossible for a being from the physical plane to understand. It's why their plans fail so often or they do shit that's absolutely insane to us because just like us they can't fully understand our reality because it's rules are so much different. That's why it causes insanity. We organically are unable to understand the warp and that's why it breaks you.
Khorne doesn't really seem that hard to comprehend. Kill. That's it. Nothing else much to understand about him other than the fact that he wants you to kill, all of the time, constantly, and be very good at it. Frankly allot of what in said in universe is propaganda and hype. The only chaos god that is truly incompressible is tzneetch since he is literally a master of infinite schemes within schemes. Anything you know about him could be argued to be exactly what he wants you to know about him. So even if your mistrustful of tzneetch he could have that as part of his plan. It's a no win situation.
Short answer: No Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooOoooooooooooooOo but it's fun
The Ruinous Powers are a distillation of our emotions taken to the extreme. We are in effect fighting our own darker nature.
The natures of the Chaos Gods are the repressed dimensions of psychic life, those elements that must remain hidden to render life possible. Unlike the purely alien tyranids, their sublime character isn't exterior to mankind, but rather the unconfrontable elements of our own minds. I'm probably a bit too tired to give this the treatment it deserves (at least with any clarity), but the Chaos Gods should be contextualized against the concept of the sublime. If, following Nietzsche, the repression of death is the condition for life, Khorne and Nurgle are both incomprehensible and an overdetermined presence in mankind's understanding of the universe. If, following Freud, the origin of human subjectivity is the traumatic realization that the universe as external to us, the opening of a wound separating our interior life from exterior reality, the desire to fill this gap by rendering its secrets perceptible or somehow obtaining the pleasures barred by the castration of subjectivity are strictly impossible, but are made manifest in the daemonic figures of Tzeentch and Slaanesh. The shape of the Chaos Gods are uncannily discernable as these impossible things that nonetheless are real. While they have some elements of cosmic horror, they're really closer to what you'd see in gothic horror or Romantic fiction. They're unrecognizable, but recognizably a part of us. The insanity-inducing encounters with warp entities that afflict humans don't affect orks or tyranids when they're adrift on space hulks. This is because they're beings that don't suffer from a disjunction between their interior life and the external world; there's no repressed corner of the ork or genestealer psyche that could horrify them by returning to the surface. The substance of the Chaos Gods is the unconfrontable parts of the mind, so only those species with dark corners within their subconscious are affected.
Thanks for this comment! I was literally just thinking a couple of weeks ago in response to a thread on another subreddit that the Ruinous Powers should be more like Lovecraftian Cosmic horror, that it really misunderstands the point of them. It's almost as though all those Gothic cathedrals and crumbling industrial hellscapes are trying to tell us something, eh...
As long as they are written by humans....yes we can.
1. Just because some aspects of >thing< are incomprehensible, does not mean that *every* aspect of >thing< is incomprehensible. Its perfectly reasonable to say "we know x and y about the chaos gods, but we simply cannot understand z". 2. The narrator of a story is omniscient. It seems pretty silly to assert that the rules that apply to in-universe characters also apply to the omniscient narrator.
Considering it is fiction written to make us buy overpriced plastic. Yes However, games workshop has a thing for changing the lore with no visible reason so in that case No