thousandbuns

[thousandbuns]

Memory is such a strange thing. You remember the trees and flowers that once grew in your homelands, and the patterns - shapes, colors, sequences - that came from them. You remember how these patterns were woven into cloth and painted onto clay, but not the hands that did it.

You remember the various animals, domestic and wild, that used to live there, and the objects crafted in their image - toys, instruments, pottery. You remember what materials were used and how they were harvested, but not the people who worked the clay digs, cut the wood or harvested bone and horn.

You remember a village - the shape of each house and layout of passages between them - but not its inhabitants. In your recurring dreams, it is always empty. All the doors are wide-open, but no face comes out to greet you. Smoke lingers in the air as always, but the sharp smell of gunpowder chokes out the scent of burning wood. You feel the warmth of the flames around you, but you know the true blaze is yet to come. The weapon in your hands weighs heavy despite your enhanced physique.

Finally, a familiar voice breaks the silence. It's your lochias - your squad commander - at the time. The exact words are long lost to your memory, but you remember his way of speaking - curt, rough, always on the edge. Most of the time you wouldn't hear anything but commands, insults and reprimands snarled through his teeth. That one time, however, he speaks of you with praise.

You were focused, efficient and obedient. Your value to the Legion is proven once more, and you will be rewarded accordingly.

You remember thinking - because you still do - that you'd rather be punished.

You wake up and breathe in the stale, faintly chemical voidship air. The unpleasant heat on your back subsides as soon as you roll over to your side and tug off the thin bedsheets. The dormitory around you is near-empty. Your lochias - a stern, but patient and soft-spoken man - approaches in silence, sits at the edge of your bed and cradles your hand. He couldn't have understood whatever words you spoke in your sleep, but he clearly knows you had that dream again.

Both of you have one. None of you ever mention the details.

You just squeeze his hand and nod your head, and he slowly lets go. He knows there's no point in dwelling. You're set to deploy again today, and you need to be focused, efficient, obedient. It's what the Legion values and rewards. It's how you survive.

Sometimes you'd rather didn't. And sometimes you'd rather just forgot. But as both of you get up and ready, you remind yourself once more, the thing isn't that you need to remember or forget.

The thing is that you'd rather not need to remember in the first place.

#warhammer 40k #ylthinocrambles #iron warriors #hellmaws tag #oc:bogdan

[thousandbuns]

(You ever get an idea and then just-- continue to vibrate over it?)

(I do and it ironically makes writing things harder because I end up getting the Chestnut Amazon syndrome and fixating on the base details without escalating things correctly and filling in gaps further down the line)

(Anyway, Hellmaws are designed to be a perfect little microcosm of just how fucked up beyond belief can you get without Chaos' influence. All it takes is enshrined trauma, unbroken cycle of abuse and an environment of of pure toxicity.)

"Traditionalist" Iron Warriors warband that got the wrong memo out of Olympia and incorporates some form of kin-slaying into its initiation rituals as a proof of "obedience" and "reliability".

To say that the consequences are quite dire would be an understatement.

#ylthinocrambles #warhammer 40k #hellmaws tag #iron warriors

[thousandbuns]

Older warband members often make snide remarks about "children clinging to a mother's skirt", but there is an unspoken, bitter understanding that it was an outsider to the warband - a traitor, a turncoat, a pathetic crestfallen soul - who somehow managed to win the trust, favor and obedience of the youngest recruits despite rarely ever raising his voice, let alone his hand. Tensions are eased enough to keep the squad operational. Conflicts rarely escalate past lowest command level. The machine is treated with gentle word over hard maintenance, yet it appears to be well-oiled, working better than ever. Somehow, a broken man manages to hold together other broken souls, and the sole argument against him is that he's a convert, betrayer to his own kin and blood.

"Traditionalist" Iron Warriors warband that got the wrong memo out of Olympia and incorporates some form of kin-slaying into its initiation rituals as a proof of "obedience" and "reliability".

To say that the consequences are quite dire would be an understatement.

#ylthinocrambles #warhammer 40k #hellmaws tag #iron warriors

[thousandbuns]

Half the warband exhibits "violent tendencies" and is often only kept in line by threat or act of punishment. The other half causes the band's Apothecary to become eerily proficient at managing mental health crisis situations and treating scars. Both halves have a non-insignificant overlap. The Warsmith still insists that the system works and the problem lies with the quality of new recruits and their mental conditioning. Whippings shall continue until the new squad members obey their orders.

"Traditionalist" Iron Warriors warband that got the wrong memo out of Olympia and incorporates some form of kin-slaying into its initiation rituals as a proof of "obedience" and "reliability".

To say that the consequences are quite dire would be an understatement.

#ylthinocrambles #warhammer 40k #hellmaws tag #iron warriors

[thousandbuns]

"Traditionalist" Iron Warriors warband that got the wrong memo out of Olympia and incorporates some form of kin-slaying into its initiation rituals as a proof of "obedience" and "reliability".

To say that the consequences are quite dire would be an understatement.

#ylthinocrambles #warhammer 40k #hellmaws tag #iron warriors

[thousandbuns]

Pro-tip: do not combine autism, Space Marine conditioning and Tzeentchian allegiance into one entity. End-results will be devastating to the subject and everyone else in the next five sectors.

#warhammer 40k #ylthinocrambles #oc: khonsu #thousand sons #I'm not putting a fully-armored SM in the Family Guy death pose without a 3D model ever again

[thousandbuns]

Average latter half of the light cycle in the Lord-Sorcerer chambers aboard Chaos voidship Wayfaring Medea.

(Also I couldn't do quick funny doodles if my life depended on it.)

#warhammer 40k #ylthinocrambles #oc: khonsu

[thousandbuns]

The secondary instance is Tzeentchian change kicking in and repeating that old trauma in a conscious way - the constant awareness of irreversible mutation worming its way through your flesh and slowly taking away the body you so painstakingly fought to reclaim, like a divine punishment for your pitiful attempt at resisting it in the first place.

My brain decided to move back to Khonsuposting. You'd think I'd have every square micrometer of the Autistic Evil Wizard nailed down after 3+ years and yet I keep having new ideas for them and it's honestly kind of worrying because I can't tell if that's a mark of high creativity or being fucking dumb and unable to workshop a complete idea fast enough.

Anyway. This time it's an intersection of Su's primary instance of body image issues and dysphoria (tied to their "old", pre-biomancy body) and psychic ability, focusing on the Astartes conversion process and how they remember it. Or, rather, don't remember-yet-remember because it was successfully purged and suppressed from their mind alongside most pre-conversion memories - but some remembrance of that body horror burned itself into Su's psychic presence. The straining growth, the deep surgical intrusion. Breaking and reassembling, fitting you into a narrow mold in a crude, unreliable process. An act of change enforced on you, and fully beyond your control.

The body and mind forgot, but the soul didn't - and it wishes it did.

#ylthinocrambles #oc: khonsu

[thousandbuns]

My brain decided to move back to Khonsuposting. You'd think I'd have every square micrometer of the Autistic Evil Wizard nailed down after 3+ years and yet I keep having new ideas for them and it's honestly kind of worrying because I can't tell if that's a mark of high creativity or being fucking dumb and unable to workshop a complete idea fast enough.

Anyway. This time it's an intersection of Su's primary instance of body image issues and dysphoria (tied to their "old", pre-biomancy body) and psychic ability, focusing on the Astartes conversion process and how they remember it. Or, rather, don't remember-yet-remember because it was successfully purged and suppressed from their mind alongside most pre-conversion memories - but some remembrance of that body horror burned itself into Su's psychic presence. The straining growth, the deep surgical intrusion. Breaking and reassembling, fitting you into a narrow mold in a crude, unreliable process. An act of change enforced on you, and fully beyond your control.

The body and mind forgot, but the soul didn't - and it wishes it did.

#ylthinocrambles #oc: khonsu

[thousandbuns]

It was utterly wasted for an absolute wet shart of an ending, Jesus fucking Christ on a skateboard, if I had any stake in Dark Angels I'd hate this book with a burning passion, and I'm otherwise just baffled, flabbergasted, speechless and lowkey mad that this shit got printed, wasting ink, paper, water, electricity and the collective time of all its readers instead of getting sent back by the editorial for extensive rewrites in order to make this a Horus Heresy Dark Angels novel and not some Shitface McFucknugget's boring origin story.

I might get mad enough to do a breakdown of why I think this book completely failed to execute on its plot points in comparison to similar ones in "Horus Rising" and "A Thousand Sons", and also post a collection of Discord screencaps documenting my growing bafflement and anger towards this hot cloud of methane, but for now I'll just drop a PSA:

Do not bother with reading "Descent of Angels", even if-- hell, especially if you like Dark Angels. It's 75% a bad coming-of-age YA fantasy novel and 25% lame Space Marine bolter porn. It's not even a nothingburger, it's a shit-sandwich. I only made it through a combination of spite, wanting to read through it before tackling any other DA book (like Lion's recent 40K novel or Luther's novel) and having a Discord server ready to listen to me screaming and occasionly riff on the book with me (or express concern at my unhealthy stubbornness in reading something that I find bad and joyless, sorry if I was rude at y'all back then). The "Lion doing a Vergil' joke single-handedly carried me through the last 2 days of fighting this trash heap.

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles #horus heresy #to steal a server joke: descent of angels upon deez nuts

[thousandbuns]

Oh yeah, we finally get to "Dark Angels doing shit during the Great Crusade" part of the book 200 pages in

It's a detachment of DAs taking over guard duty from White Scars fleet - their goal is to hang over a decently advanced human-inhabited planet and if the local bureaucracy and Imperial diplomats don't resolve the twelve-month-long stalemate over the planet's compliance with the Imperial rules in the next two months, Lion and the 1st are taking full control and it's up to them if they continue the peace talks or resort to armed assault.

Most DA Astartes in the fleet are discontent with the idea of this "guard duty" and lowkey itching to kill already.

Why is Horus Rising-tier of actually genuinely good and clever plot setup suddenly showing up over 2/3rds into this asinine story, and why do I feel it'll be wasted somehow?

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles

[thousandbuns]

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles #reblogging back to the right blog for preservation purposes

[thousandbuns]

"We will rally the entire society of Caliban, including the smelly dumb peasants that we hated and excluded for years, within just a few months by staging a great act of terror and pinning the blame on the Imperium!"

Guys

Don't make me post a clip of the Ghost from "The Wedding" (1973, dir. Andrzej Wajda, based on 1901 stageplay by Stanisław Wyspiański).

Or a clip of Captain Torres from Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown - Ten Million Relief Plan (2019, Namco Bandai)

Also please stop eating paint from your armor, it's absolutely not helping with your brain damage.

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles

[thousandbuns]

I'd be more invested in the "Caliban's unique culture and traditions are threatened by Imperium's propaganda machine and cultural homogenization" if it wasn't a) getting speedran in a really tight timeframe within the story itself, b) conveyed to me through the lens of Old Men Yelling At Clouds who think they can win a guerilla war against the Imperium by hiding in the woods... as if it wasn't already shown that Imperials can just quickly mow down whole swaths of forests and crack open mountains with heavy-duty machinery.

The lead poisoning is real strong here.

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles

[thousandbuns]

Speaking of bad pacing.

Zahariel completely ignoring that Librarian Istafael just told him he's a psyker and brought up something about "the Warp" and how "reaching there" can be dangerous to instead laser-focus on the story of the Primarchs, Legiones Astartes and Great Crusade. Doesn't even seem to register or act surprised at the Librarian talking about "genetic templates" despite nothing in the story so far even hinting at Calibanites understanding this ostensibly modern scientific terminology, not even in a Canticle For Leibnitz sort of way. It's like someone came up to you and said "you're a Jedi" and "your body is full of midichlorians", but you got completely sidelined by a story about Glupp Shitto's creation of the Galactic Senate or whatever instead. Technically it might be related to the Jedi Order (I don't know Star Wars lore nearly enough to tell), but it doesn't answer the immediate questions of "who are the Jedi", "the fuck is a midichlorian" and "what does it mean for my future".

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles

[thousandbuns]

I know that the Imperium is quick to organize, but setting up complex industry and drafting on a world that hasn't even heard of you a month ago does feel a little quick. As if this novel spun its wheels in the mud LARPing as the shittiest YA/coming-of-age fantasy story I've read for way too long and is now desperately trying to speedrun to the "Horus Heresy" part of this Horus Heresy novel.

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

[thousandbuns]

"What about the nobility of warfare", cry the same knightly orders that use such noble weaponry as CHAINSWORDS, GUNS with EXPLOSIVE BULLETS and INCENDIARY ARTILLERY SHELLS.

Went back to "Descent of Angels" after getting so fucking mad at its idiocy I had to take half a year's break from it, and it continues to be an absolute slog, filled with completely redundant paragraphs, trite adages, hamfisted pararells that DON'T FUCKING WORK and characters so stupid I swear they paint their armor with lead paint and don't put iodine in their salt.

#40k rambles