#ive edited this post like 500 billion times i will not lie

[luwupercal]

so, next betrayer quote. word highlighted is "tics".

'What do you want, captain?' Pain tics flawed one side of his face, leaving the other slackened in a dull snarl. She knew better than to ask if he was in pain. Angron was always in pain.

my thoughts on this are mostly that once i'm in an area where the wifi is more consistent i'm absolutely going to research tics like the ones described here, if only to see where the inspiration from the real world might've been drawn and what that could also inversely tell us about Angron's whole situation. if anybody experiences tics like his and would like to talk about it in relation to this passage, i would love to hear, honestly

and also, Angron's chronic pain... you know, if the emperor hadn't made the primarchs immune to medication, Angron could be functioning a lot better with meds. i think that's an interesting deconstructionist angle to take, and one of many flaws in the emperor's "knowledge" of the human body that Angron demonstrates just sort of through his experiences w the emperor

prefacing this by saying i'm physically abled, but it really is not talked about enough that the emperor's view of medicine and genetics, albeit not necessarily on purpose in part of the writers, is very much an able-bodied layman's. like, he thinks if you make a guy bigger and stronger and immune-er to poison it makes him objectively better. there is canon evidence to argue the emperor doesn't understand the theory of evolution. a lot of how the primarchs work — how space marines work, too — makes no sense, including the seemingly unacknowledged interference a certain square cube law would have on their bodies or how their knees would spontaneously combust or how two hearts is not really a solution for a really big body's blood pumping conundrums.

and i know we're encouraged to just suspend our disbelief, and i usually do that with Speculative Science Whoopsies, but i find it makes a lot more sense to me in this specific case for the emperor's pseudoscience to not work in-universe either without the assist of heavy duty witchery and psykercraft, which the emperor has in spades, because it paints such a picture of him

this is somewhat getting away from me but my basic point is that the emperor being a genius geneticist and/or a strategic genius is (just based on canonical evidence and things he has done) a deeply skewed untruth, and that Angron suffered bc of that, and that him being in pain all the time is fucked up, obviously, but it's even worse knowing that he's not even undergoing any mitigating treatment for his conditions, and in fact might not even be able to do so at all specifically because he was built to fulfill the emperor's idea of a superhuman

and i dunno i just think it's a really telling dynamic that the same guy who said "if you do daemon magic you will get pregnant and die" is the same one who also went "i'm maximizing the chances you will never get poisoned or hurt permanently, but if something Does break through your barriers you're fucked forever lololololol i guess, instead of trying to be flexible and maybe devoting less time to the barrier and instead spending it on any ability for you to bounce back from anything that might cross the barrier". very just... universally abstinence-only. and now angron's suffering because of that, potentially without even painkillers or anything available to him to mitigate that eternal pain

like "if you get messed up you're fucked. simply not be hurt ever lol"

i wrote a whole angry ramble here thinking about the person who said angron should be "put down like a rabid dog" to me that one time on here if anybody else remembers but i decided to excise it because im somewhat insecure of whenever i AngryPost because it never turns out good like i always regret it. but y'know i think Angron's disability doesn't mean you should strip him of his personhood, is basically my summary of what i'm saying here

also yknow Khârn's relationship w all of this is complicated and, yeah, Angron's rage at his mistreatment, pushed further and worsened by his nails, led to him deeply gravely mistreating the WE, and when Khârn calls him out, he's right in doing so, because he's actually hurt by the ongoing chain of harm that Angron very much perpetuates. but that doesn't give the audience a right to strip him of his personhood and not treat him with respect or basic dignity. i guess is my line there

anyway all of these people are adults in the military and they're all war criminals so i'm cutting it there but i... i dunno. i hope ive expressed myself well