Let me tell you all about Warhammer 40K's biggest, saddest boy

Warhammer 40,000 is about epic, sweeping battlefields full of clashing armies of impossible scale in a galaxy that has devolved into only war. That’s a pretty great setting, especially because there are no good guys — every army is pretty evil and dabbles in at least a few war crimes, as a little treat. But each army also has its own characters: heroic generals, stalwart warriors, brilliant tacticians, and, in the case of the Imperium, a very large and sad man by the name of Roboute Guilliman.

Guilliman is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction, simply because his circumstances are so delightful. I’m going to drop as little lore as possible here, because this character is delightful for really simple reasons. 

The big boy’s backstory

Basically, the Imperium of Man is a dogmatic, oppressive, authoritarian regime that worships the rotting corpse of its once-mighty God-Emperor. This carrion lord sustains itself only through tremendous amounts of human sacrifice. 

Ten thousand years ago, the Emperor led humanity in a Great Crusade to conquer the galaxy. The Emperor created twenty big sons, called Primarchs, to serve as his generals in this task. Unfortunately, everything went wrong with these rowdy boys — they were launched into the galaxy across a bunch of worlds, most of which were a pretty bad place to raise a baby.

The Emperor eventually collected all of his boys ... but two had to be straight deleted from the Imperium’s records for mysterious reasons and nine would turn traitor in a giant civil war called the Horus Heresy. The Heresy is a mix between a tragedy of Greek Gods and a long, grueling, intergalactic war. The Heresy ends with a pyrrhic victory for the Imperium — the Emperor is badly wounded and must be interred upon his Golden Throne, a massive piece of technology that now serves as his life support.

Over the next ten thousand years, the good guy Primarchs slowly died or disappeared, Heresy-era Marines became rarer and rarer, and the Imperium drifted into worshipping the once atheist Emperor, eventually becoming “the cruellest and most bloody regime possible”, a place where witches are burned at the stakes, generations are ground to the bone working in massive factoriums, basically every major building is adorned with human skulls, everything is stamped with a wax and parchment purity seal, and holy sanctums have decorated babies that have been cybernetically tinkered with to appear as angels.

Arise, Guilliman

Roboute Guilliman is one of the most boring Primarchs in the Heresy, but it’s not his fault. He landed on Macragge, a world very similar to the Roman Empire, and was adopted by a good and honorable man and his loving wife. Guilliman was raised by actual parents and inherited their empire, the five hundred worlds of Ultramar. The Ultramarines, his legion of Space Marines, are the largest and most stable of their kind. So, Guilliman is the Primarch with the least amount of personal drama during the Heresy, and some time after that war, one of his traitorous brothers attacked Macragge and poisoned poor Roboute so bad that he had to be put into stasis. For ten thousand years, he was on display — a living statue, and a reminder of greater times.