Khornate Knights

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

This article or section involves Matthew Ward, Spiritual Liege, who is universally-reviled on /tg/. Because this article or section covers Ward's copious amounts of derp and rage, fans of the 40K series are advised that if they proceed onward, they will see fluff and crunch violation of a level rarely seen.

This article or section is being fought over by people undoing each other's changes. Please use the Discussion page for fighting instead of the article.

I make no claims to be a fan of the Bolter Bitches, but this is one of the most grievous offenses Matt Ward has transcribed to paper.

Not to be confused with Khornate Knights or Skullcrushers

SoBs make shmancy hats as well. Grey Knights have apparently taken a page from Necron Flayers.

But that this were real.

Really though, the Grey Knights and Sisters are total bros. Disregard Ward. As usual.

Rage

Basically one story in the new Grey Knight Codex, "The Bloodtide Returns", lists the Grey Knights as coming across a planet wherein a powerful Dark Age of Technology nanite weapon controlled by a bloodthirster resided - one so powerful that it was corrupting the populace by flying into their pores and driving them crazy. There was a convent of Sisters that were being slowly wiped out near the site whose faith was keeping them pure and untouched by the taint except for all the ones who were corrupted, and instead of asking for the Sisters' assistance the Grey Knights proceeded to slaughter them all and make wards from their blood, then go about banishing the daemon. Read the fucking fluff some time. All after the codex stating literally that their faith is strong enough to protect them from any kind of daemonic corruption, so they wouldn't have even needed those wards.

Think about this, for just a minute. The Sisters' faith protected some of them from being corrupted. Yet, as has been shown before, there have been a few Sisters of Battle that have fallen to Chaos. In come the Grey Knights, whose faith is so powerful it is quite literally their strongest weapon and their most potent protection. These Grey Knights' faith is not strong enough to withstand the NANITE WEAPONS of Chaos, while the Sisters' is? Does that make ANY sense at all?

This is a classic case not just heresy, but of extra heresy; canon to this point had explicitly detailed 3 things:

• That the Grey Knights greatly loathe Chaos and are completely immune to its corrupting influence. They wouldn't need wards made on the spot to withstand daemonic corruption, given that just their Aegis armour's own built-in wards would deflect any corrupting influence that would try to tempt them (assuming that it COULD tempt them at all).

• That no Grey Knight in the history of the chapter has ever fallen to the temptations of Chaos due to the massive amounts of spiritual and physical indoctrination and training they go through that would make the Space Marines' training and creation regimen look like the Guard's conscript training, along with their anti-daemon Aegis armours. In addition, in older fluff, the Grey Knights COULD fall to Chaos, in theory. However, in addition to their intense faith and rigorous physical and mental training, they closely regulate themselves. If a Battle-Brother's reaction to Chaos was anything less than "NO FUCKING WAY!", they would have a force halberd to the face in record time.

• That but a single Sister of Battle has fallen to Chaos.

And yet we have this - evidence of the darkest kind of heresy, if not outright Khorne worship, and it's canon.

Fucking Matt Ward. Next thing you know, Kharn will be working for the Tau or something. Yeah about that...in the novelization of Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, it was revealed that the protagonist was actually being aided by Khorne...*nervous laugh* *BLAM* HERESY!!!!!

And the Sisters of Battle get mutilated a lot whenever Ward comes near them. We're starting to get the feeling that he's into sexist snuff flicks.

On Misogyny

Now for the tricky part; misogyny is subjective, with most people defining it as an irrational or pathological dislike of women.

There is in that definition alone four points for us to try to puzzle this one out:

• For the fa/tg/uys to whom Bloodtide is misogyny it is fairly obvious (given that there was no reason for the Sisters of Battle to die in-universe) that their deaths were the direct result of an irrational act of contempt for women or misogyny by Matt "bane of /tg/'s existence" Ward. It could have been any Imperial force, but he deliberately chose it to be the women who were just a footnote in the story other than being casualties.

• To the second group of fa/tg/uys, 40K is a violent setting in which people get killed horribly all the time, and the Sisters of Battle are no exception to this (see for example the Second Battle of Sanctuary 101 in the novel Hammer and Anvil); to this group the Sister's deaths are a result of the general misanthropy and overall grimdarkness of the setting, which delights in the brutal slaughter of humans (and xenos) regardless of gender. Sisters were just a randomly chosen group, and it might as well have been Imperial Guard, Inquisitors, or Ultramarines well, maybe that last one's out of the question for Ward regardless, but the important thing is that they were just casualties, and Ward was blissfully ignorant of the unfortunate implications of an all-women fighting force being slain by an all-male army that was supposed to be on their side.

• There is, however, a third interpretation of the events of Bloodtide, but it is of some sophistication, ergo not a product of Matt "Ima troll u" Ward. Were he so capable he could have used the Bloodtide to demonstrate that the Imperium in-universe is sexist, the Grey Knights as flawed beings, and that the needless deaths therein would have been seen as unimportant to anyone anywhere because the victims were women. In short using sexism irrrrrrrronically. That said, there's no reason to believe that 38,000 years of human history has led to any sort of decline in sexism (indeed, we can see that kind of behavior in Imperial Guard in novels).

• A newer one is that, based on past fluff, Grey Knights often use the blood of priests due to the fact the Imperial Cult is a martyrdom religion combined with martyrdom being a major theme of the Sisters of Battle. It wouldn't be remotely out of place if the Sisters had agreed to being paint knowing that it would indeed make the Grey Knights stronger in the face of Chaos. Factor in that Matt Ward is capable of writing Sisters well (as shown in their codex), and the cries of misogyny seem like just the fact that the story left out a lot of important details due to just being a stub, and oversensitivity that was gotten away with due to Ward being popular to hate on. The Grey Knights are humans. Stalwart protectors of mankind. Holy Warriors of the Emperor blah blah blah. Killing humans of any sort - most especially the holy Daughters of the Emperor - is heresy when done for absolutely no reason (even if the reason is shaky). Also, note the utter lack of "and the Grey Knights killed all the Imperial Guardsmen for lulz" in the codex, or in any of Matt Ward's writings. This lends credence to the interpretation that the Sisters allowed themselves to be killed to ensure victory, but the way it was written makes it seem that they were murdered instead of acting as willing sacrifices, further adding to the debate there is Ben Counter's short story "Sacrifice" (from Victories of the Space Marines compilation), it reveals that in fact Grey Knight bolter ammunition can actually slay daemons so well because each one of the bolts is infused with the lifestream of a righteous man, read, a good man's life for a bolt, similarly the Aegis armour is actually infused with tens of psykers' essence, in other words, the Grey Knights's power against Chaos doesn't come just from their inherent psyker talents and faith but from the overall (often forced) sacrifice of the Imperium's population.

Which of these you believe is most plausible probably depends on how deep seated your hatred of Ward is, whether you are the type of person to give others the benefit of the doubt or to immediately assume the worst, and how you feel about violence towards women.

As it stands, we'll be keeping an eye on him. Y'know, because we've nothing better to do; and because the last group of Sister Militants we assigned to this thankless task tried to kill him.

Also, The Sisters of Battle are fighting the BLOODTIDE... HA! PMS joke, you fail at it (and IF that was Ward's idea of a joke that makes it even worse).

Seriously, what the fuck?

The very fact that we were even having the above conversation means that even in a best-case scenario, something has gone horribly wrong in the storytelling department.

Within the context of the 40k verse, there is some basis that Knight would do something that we would otherwise consider being pants-on-head retarded. Note that GW isn't shy of inventing reasons to justify otherwise allied forces to kill the fuck out of each other. First, the GKs are stone cold pragmatists who burn planets just to keep secret something particularly heretical some guardsmen might have witnessed. Second, is that they are all-around stone cold motherfuckers, despite the whole incorruptible nobility thing and finest-of-the-Emperor's-finest thing. There's a pretty good reason that they aren't really trusted by the other factions that would fight Chaos too, since the Knights seem to think everybody else as a bit more expendable than themselves. Killing the SoB in that story was just one story of dicking around the other Imperial elements, and the Knights apparently do this sort of thing at least semi-regularly.

BUT!!

Why the GKs killed the SoB for extra protection is a plot hole that they really don't fill in. Remember, this is in a book that played up the Knights as literally impossible to corrupt. Might have been for extra physical protection to make sure they don't get killed by the Bloodtide rather than for spiritual protection, but He Who Wrote This Crap missed the beat.

On GK/Ordo Malleus Teamkilling

"Only the Grey Knights survive in the service of the Ordo. All other troops die when given over to them. The reason for non-survival among military units attached to the Ordo Malleus is simple. Any troops that an Inquisitor Ordinary has commanded have been exposed to Daemons. They are privy to one of the most closely-guarded Imperial secrets: that Daemons exist and Chaos is a terrible threat. Those that survive a battle or campaign are executed, with full honours, shortly afterwards. They are expendable, and entire Imperial regiments and corps have been despatched (sic) by the Ordo Malleus."

This is from Realms of Chaos (1988) and paraphrased in Codex: Grey Knights. Ordo Malleus and Grey Knight types are not nice. They euthanize or mind scrub nearly anyone who finds out about Chaos/Daemons. No reason was needed to kill the SoBs at all. The Ordo Malleus/Grey Knights kill practically everybody they run into no matter how you cut it.

Gallery

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  What REALLY happened that day.