Just another Wind-Up Doll

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

Like, even the people who hate him seem to take his story at face value, and just disagree about whether he should still hold power now that he's a pile of agony badly pretending to be a person, but idk

SOOOOOO okay 40k lore shifted over time and i get the impression, personally, that before like 2005ish and the Horus Heresy books, we were meant to be skeptical of the backstory given to the Imperium and the Emperor. Personally I much prefer the idea that he Made It The Fuck Up and that the great crusade was NOT justified, because that reflects the reality of fascism and empire in our world.

Now, as of the Heresy books, we're generally meant to believe that he definitely was with humanity basically that whole time, that humanity needed to be unified under one military to survive, etc etc. The official take on Warhammer 40k lore is that "everything is canon", ie all interpretations are equally valid and any lore can be construed as in-universe propaganda or as actual history, but most of 40k these days does take these statements at face value.

Personally I prefer my Imperium to be Actually Wrong rather than a necessary evil justified by the setting, so I choose to believe that the whole Shaman Guiding Humanity backstory is a bunch of propaganda and that Chaos would best be quelled by the Imperium's collapse and the resulting long-term improvement of your average human's QOL buttt you have to understand that most writing and lore and most fans are not going to agree with that take.