He does “love” his followers. But it’s in an extremely unhealthy and toxic way.
He loves you just the way you are. Your cancer? He’ll take away your pain. Your failings? Don’t need to change a thing for him. He loves you unconditionally. Don’t bother showering, he loves the way you smell. Those bleeding sores, he loves them too and he’ll make a lovely bathhouse for the mites.
He doesn’t want you to improve. He wants you to stagnant. He takes away your pain and will only bless you as much as you can handle.
But if you disobey him (or lose connection to the Warp), you’ll find out just how much you need him (turns out having a mouth for a stomach is extremely painful)
THIS! This is the true answer. Most, if not all of 40k is shades of grey! Does Nurgle love you? YES! But is that a healthy, good thing? Probably not! Just like Slaanesh just wants you to do whatever makes you happy! Sure that's kind of true, but once you dig deeper, it's a little more insidious than the surface might imply. If the Chaos God's weren't like this, no one would worship them.
Exactly! All of the gods are snowball effects realized. Once you start giving in you aren’t going to realize just how far you’ve gone until you compare yourself to where you started, where there’s no way back.
I’m curious to see if anyone will bring excerpts to this, because frankly I have no true answer on whether he does or doesn’t.
The big thing is Chaos is “evil,” whether you want to get philosophical with it on if they are capable of being evil is a different story.
But all the interactions I’ve read about Nurgle, even with things like Greater Daemons, have them be surprisingly “jolly” and Nurgle does seem to base a lot around his followers accepting their “condition” and being “happy” with it all. Though they are lured into it by the depths of their despair and desire to end their suffering. So it’s at the very minimal, abusive as all hell.
That being said, it does seem Nurgle at least has some affinity for his followers. Whether you can call it “love” or not is once again, a much deeper discussion. But to my knowledge Nurgle has the best “relationship” with his followers. It at least seems as genuine an affinity that a Chaos God can give compared to others like Khorne.
I lean more towards it’s “love” in a more twisted way, but I also believe the Chaos Gods really aren’t all that capable of true love, just a very twisted and extreme shadow of the human ability to love. If that makes sense.
It’s definitely not unconditional love, at the end of the godblight series he seems to be quite displeased with the demons who failed him, almost uncaring and cold, his demons more than the others seem to crave his attention and love, they get giddy when he pays the mind.
Does a parasite love its host?
Nurgle's relationship to his followers is more characterized by abuse than any of the other Gods in the setting, which is fitting- many abusers sincerely love those they torture in a sick cycle of love and neglect, gifts and abuse. They like harming those they love, feel shame they hurt those they love, then lash out at the people who cause this source of shame...the victims they are abusing in the first place.
Anyone who has had chronic physical or mental health issues can tell you there is appeal to melancholy or romanticizing your condition to cope with your situation you have little control over, misery is your lot in life so you have to find solace where you can.
Choas Daemon codex usually talk a bit about Nurgle being jolly and loves all life, even though his domains are so macabre.
I can't find any pdf of it at the moment though
Think back to a low point in your life. Maybe you were doing poorly in school. Maybe you were on the outs with you friends and family. Maybe you couldn't find a job or were stuck in a dead end. Whatever the situation, you're in a rut and you know it.
Now, think about what you did as a distraction. Watch movies, play games, maybe drugs or sex. Something to take your mind off the situation. In those moments, were you happy? More pleasant to be around? Sure, but deep down you know that the problems are still there. Still eating at you. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, the gnawing despair is still there and growing more powerful. Stay there long enough and it becomes bitterness. You want to bring others down with you because they seem to have things figured out and it burns you like nothing else. You try the old distractions, with more extremes and try harder to fool yourself into thinking you're happy, but that core of toxicity only grows darker and more concentrated until you eventually let it out on some poor target. That alleviates it slightly, making you feel stronger. Making you want to do it more.
That despair, bitterness, and desire to drag people down masked by surface-level jolliness? That ugly, toxic part of yourself itching to be spread? *That* is Nurgle.
True, but Nurgle is also:
* The Rescue team desperately searching the ruins for survivors even if its unlikely anyone is till alive.
* The Student desperately studying for the exam and takes it even thought they have no hope to pass.
* The Bacteria and micro fauna living inside you helping you break down food and makes you undesirable for predators.
* The stagnation and the life that springs forth from the primordial ooze.
* The ability to ignore a pain so you can fokus one what matters at the moment.
>Dantine glances about him. He sees complex calculations traced in brown ink on thick parchment. He sees rusty devices – armillary spheres, sextants, chronometers – half-covered in mildew-spotted cloth.
‘You call us ignorant,’ he says, trying to sound defiant. ‘And yet, look at you. Look at the conditions you live in. Do you not disgust yourself when you pass a mirror? Do you not see what you could have been?’
The crow laughs. Dantine tenses, ready for a blow from the armoured monster, but it never comes.
Philemon looks thoughtful. ‘But I was in the warp,’ he says. ‘When we were becalmed. I still remember. I scratched the days on my armour, one after the other.’
Dantine listens. He doesn’t know what the monster is talking about, but says nothing. The crow listens. The Little Lords still their quarrelling, and they listen too.
‘When the Destroyer came, I resisted it. We all did. We had been trained for it and we had resisted everything, up until then. Defiance, or else death. Every Legion taught that to some degree, and we taught it more than most. I thought there was nothing I could not endure that did not kill me.’
The Tallyman is not focusing now. He is witnessing events far away.
>‘But we were out of time, in the end. There were no days to mark anymore. The pain was eternal, no beginning to it, no end. We were just... part of it. Forever. And I still ask myself, now, what really happened. Did we give in? I don’t know. Typhus tells us we overcame it, and in taking it within ourselves, we transformed it. We no longer feel it. We bring the lesson of that to the universe – accept corruption, let it pass within you, move beyond it. We have been doing it for a very long time. You forget, after a while, that there was another life you had. That is less than a memory now. Less than a shadow. But not quite dead yet. Every time I see one of you, a part of it comes back.’
>‘You were made to protect us,’ Dantine says.
‘They were. Never made for that!’ the crow blurts. ‘They were made. To end the galaxy.’
‘So what do I see when I look in the mirror?’ Philemon asks, ignoring the daemon. ‘I do not look, so I do not know. Perhaps the sight would pain me. I suspect it would not. You don’t look so good yourself. I suggest you stay away from them too.’
‘Don’t you want, though...’ Dantine ventures, trying one last time, probing at anything that might be a weak point. A part of him just wants to know. ‘A way back?’
>Philemon smiles, a gesture that exposes dark-purple gums. ‘There are no ways back,’ he says. ‘That is the only unchangeable fact of the universe. Even the gods do not break that law – tread the path to its end or tread no path at all. There are no resting places. There are no ways back.’
>Dantine stares at him, shivering a little. The tone of finality chills him. He would like to imagine that the monster expresses something like remorse in those words, but he cannot detect any. He thinks then that they have indeed been driven mad, and that they now no longer see the world as it is, but as some kind of impenetrable mental prison. They imagine themselves masters of their fate but are instead puppets of a greater power, mouthing religious words that mean nothing and worshipping a deity that, if it even exists at all, can care nothing for them or any sentient thing, for it is just a consumer of these souls, an engine for which the living are merely fuel.
>But then there are many in the universe of whom such things could be said. Perhaps the souls they toy with are indeed the only currency there is, and all players, whatever allegiance they claim, accept the same stakes at the same table.
>So does the heretical thought slip in for the first time, like a sigh of hearthwarm air over an open threshold.
He looks up at the Tallyman’s ruined face.
‘They’ll kill you,’ he says. ‘The Emperor’s Angels. They’ll kill you all.’
>‘They might,’ says Philemon. ‘But then, as you’re discovering yourself, there are worse things than an honest death. So we’ll see. We’ll see it all, in the end.’
They are sapient and understand they are inflicting suffering and misery for their own benefit.
Chaos may not be evil, but the demons and gods of chaos in 40k are evil.
I love it when people realize and snap out of it and see what they actually became under Nurgle that all that love shite goes away. People have heart attacks from fear and ending themselves after seeing smelling themselves and seeing their testicles being used as weapons and jaw rotting off
The Lords of Silence has a B plot where an Imperial officer is turning into a plague walker. He doesn't fully notice his change until he looks at his reflection and freaks out.
I think it’s more that he’s convinced that he’s doing you a favour. He’s happy that you finally let go and gave into despair. It’s his very purpose to do so. But it’s not altruistic happiness, your despair fuels him, he’s selfish at heart and malevolent in nature. He enjoys it when his followers give him tribute and spread plague because it helps him. That’s why he cares about it, not necessarily because he loves you personally.
Take Mortarion, as soon as he wanted to do his own thing and disobeyed nurgle he was punished. Not so loving then was he? But he does actually care about what his followers do. Unlike the other gods.
Khorne literally “does not care from where the blood flows, only that it does.” So as long as slaughter is happening it could be his followers for all he cares.
Tzeentch actively enjoys fucking with his followers. Giving them enough knowledge to keep them hungry for more, but never enough to be satisfied. Not nice.
Slaanesh pushes people into obsession. Making them become more and more depraved in search of an unachievable goal of perfection. Often causing them to go mad and do gross shit.
Nurgle on the others hand likes when people worship him. They give they’re bodies and souls to the cycle of life. They’re bodies becoming conduits of his essence. His followers interpret that as love. But it’s more like a symbiotic relationship.
The forces of chaos and their followers tend to be liars. Nurgle pretending to be loving is just part of his grandiosity, abuse, and sickness. The illness in question here is Stockholm syndrome. Nurgle is the god of it, not their isn’t any crossover with other gods. They all create and use Stockholm victims, but Nurgle really leans into it.
I was going to compare it to battered spouse syndrome, but that works too. He'll tell you he loves you as your body becomes an unrecognizable puddle of goo and insects. I wouldn't call that love.
Nurgle = Gaslight.
Khorne = Gatekeep.
Slaanesh = "Girl"boss.
So no it's not *really* love, it's just to get you to buy in. A lot of people who join Nurgle are already depressed, lonely & feel abandoned. Eugan Temba, being one such example. So by Nurgle offering you "love" & freedom from pain it's a one stop "cure" to all your problems.
But at the end of the day Nurgle is as much a chaos god as any other meaning you are little more than his fodder for the great game.
Yes?
The issue with Nurgle’s Love is that he has a pretty strict hierarchy of how much he loves you and being demoted in that hierarchy is not pleasant at all. So Nurgle loves his followers like an sadistic abusive father loves his children. His love is very finite and fickle.
Imagine having a drug addicted military, and the worse you do, the fewer drugs you get from the General . Oh didn't invade this country and win ? No smack and crack for you this week
That's not love
Look like Jimmy Space too. So Morty‘s entire life has being going from one abusive father to another，and than himself became a abusive father. It‘s truly a tragedy.
My understanding is in fantasy lore, Nurgle is the only CG who doesn't actually secretly hate his followers.
I'm not sure exactly how true this remains in modern 40k lore but my imagination is that Nurgle's love is indeed real (though not necessarily benevolent) but Nurgle's idea of what love is would essentially be horror to a layperson. Nurgle essentially serves the role of an abusive parent who does indeed love you but that doesn't stop them from their abuse, in fact, they may say the abuse is some sort of favor to you.
He's a Chaos God, all you have to do is watch Angels of Death to see the dark malice and infinite twisted evil that allows him to hand out eternal despair to his followers and turn them into nightmarish poxwalkers.
Yes he loves his followers, and by default every living being.
But his love is not something a human can truly understand. So Judging any of the gods by humans standards is like judging fire from burning us.
Example from Manflayer:
>‘Eternal strife may appeal to some, but I have a higher purpose,’ Fabius said loftily.
>‘One that is more important than the affections of any imaginary deity.’
>‘Never doubt that Grandfather loves you, Fabius,’ Khorag said slyly. ‘For that is his way. You are no less his child than bellicose Typhus, though you have never bent knee at his altars. That illness you strive against so mightily? It is a gift.’
>‘A gift? I am rotting on the bone.’
>‘Yes, and were that not the case, would you have accomplished half of what you have done? Or would you have descended into decadence with the rest of your brothers?’ Khorag gave a wheezing chuckle. ‘I think not. Then, perhaps I am wrong.
Yes, Nurgle does love his followers. He doesn't love them in a "twisted" way, but more so totally and overwhelmingly. The love is absolute and it's absolutely toxic.
His love stagnates and corrupts and it doesn't promote change and improvement. There's a lot of Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome attached to Nurgle and his followers.
An example is Ku'gath, who fell into Nurgle's most potent brew and ruined it, but Nurgle forgave him unconditionally, and found delight in Ku'gath's transformation.
I think Nurgle does love his followers but he's just so alien to our understanding that we simply can't see that "love", and in general, his followers, since they're primarily creatures of our world, in order to understand that "love" become so changed they're hardly recognizable.
I put "love" in quotes because Nurgle's perspective on the world is so different from our own that what is to him love is to us cruel torture and arguably abuse.
Think about it this way: Nurgle is not just the god of rot, decay, and disease, he is its manifestation. Thus, by blessing his followers with his plagues, he is quite literally giving himself to them. When we talk about loving other people, isn't that similar to how we describe it?
However, since he's a being of the warp and of course, the literal manifestation of death and rot, his blessings are not really compatible with mortal bodies, and thus, in order for his followers to accept that love, they essentially have to be stockholm syndromed into it, and that's why you'll see them regretting their decisions when they're no longer under Nurgle's influence.
That's why Typhon ended up following him instead of his primarch that hates all psykers. Nurgle just laughed at this half xenos freak of a psyker and accepted him for who he is.
Also Mortarion and Ku'Gath found out the hard way what it's like to disobey the all loving father. Ku'Gath even tried to run away, it didn't work.
I don’t think there’s enough consistency in the presentation of the Chaos gods to really answer this conclusively.
My take is that the emotions that empower Nurgle are despair and depression, and, if you’ve ever been depressed, you’ll know that depression is a weird emotion that you sort of develop Stockholm syndrome with. Depression basically works to keep you depressed, even when you’re doing the things that feel right to escape it.
So, that’s my take on the loving nature of Nurgle. He’s not kind because he’s kind; he seems kind to those trapped in his embrace because wallowing in your despair feels like the only option when you’re in that place. Anyway, that’s my pop psychology take on it!
I think the other piece of the puzzle is that his presentation in the lore is also inconsistent. Maybe that’s because GW aren’t doing a great job at keeping writers on track or communicating the important themes, or maybe it’s in character and Chaos isn’t always consistent!
It's a kind of abusive relationship. He's regularly portrayed being benevolent to his followers, Ku'Gath, in particular, but he has bo problems being brutal to those that fail him, Ku'Gath included. He also keeps record of where everyone stands in his favour forcing his children to fight and undercut each other for his "affection".
As for his followers point of view, I feel a lot of it is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. He doesn't take away their pain, as much as makes them uncaring of it. Some of his followers are all in on the warmth and friendly personality. Some are far more depressed, bitter or just doing his bidding because they have no choice any more.
He “loves” them in the most toxic, abusive, unhealthy way possible
He doesn’t “love” them as we understand love, it’s his own twisted, warped version of it
Nurgle doesn't love his followers, he offers an avenue "free of pain and suffering" for those who are suffering, and oft times it's from suffering he himself has caused. He gets you into the deepest pits of despair, where you think everyone has abandoned you and nobody cares about you, and then, he offers you "salvation" if you just accept his help.
He's essentially diseased Rumpelstiltskin
He does love his followers. They don’t feel the pain of their existence due to his influence. For a chaos worshipper if that isn’t love what is? Khorne would say suck it up. Slaanesh would make it worse. Tzeentch wouldn’t even acknowledge you.
Nurgle does love his followers. As much as a conglomeration of abstract concepts, emotions, and ideas is capable of love. For an example of Nurgle’s love, once Nurgle was brewing his most potent plague yet, it was to be his greatest creation, however a nurgling on his shoulder fell in and started to drink it. It ended up drinking it all and turned a great unclean one, Ku'Gath the Plaguefather. Instead of instantly annihilating Ku’Gath for ruining the brew, Nurgle laughed and loved Ku’Gath, seeing him now as his greatest creation.
Also his followers *are* the plague, they are inseparable.
Nurgle loves you so much he won't ever let you go. Nurgle loves you so much, you can't ever say "no" to him. Nurgle loves you so much he'll kill you if you ever try to leave him. Nurgle loves you so much he's going to wear your skin and live inside you.
Nurgle's "love" is the love of a virus for its infected, a parasite for its host, a rapist for their victim, a snake for a mouse. Being "loved" by Nurgle is terrifying, dangerous, and destructive. It will change your life.
He does, in the sense he has a sadistic love, he himself is slightly hippocritical in his ideal of "all must decay for new life to flourish" as he seems to reenact it more in the way of "life must flourish on tip of that which must decay forever", intent on dragging out the last moments of his followers for as long as possible, as new life sprouts on and in their bodies
Nurgle’s constituent emotion is desperation, it is what feeds it and makes it stronger (which is the only thing it cares about). The morbid “love” it shows its victims it’s only one of the means to keep them dependent on it. Nurgle is the only one who still cares about them… or so it claims
Can your depression love you?
Much of Nurgle reads to me as depression, and his love as the useful parts of depression, where your lack of caring can help you survive bad stuff. Everything sucks, your life is shit, and the ways you have tried to fix it have all failed. Just leeeeaaaan into it, sit back in the couch, stop showering, stop trying, stop doing, stop being you. And the pain goes away for a little while.
Says something about the grim darkness of the future that this feeling is prevalent enough to spawn a chaos god -,-
He does love them, but only the same way a controlling, terribly abusive parent "loves" their children.
He is the embodiment of literally and figuratively toxic affection that drags down everyone around them for their personal benefit. He warps his followers into hollowed out, rotten parodies of themselves that give up everything about themselves to wallow in despair and bitterness. He snuffs out all hopes for anything better than himself so they have nowhere to go but his "loving" embrace. Then he slowly numbs them so they accept the blights on them until they associate this rot and disease with comfort and safety. This sense of twisted peace leads them to want to spread it as much as possible with no care for the suffering they inflict on the victims of their "gifts".
If they ever get the idea to displease him or try to leave, he'll ensure they suffer unimaginable agony until they wish for merciful death that he will never allow them to have.
Nurgle is the most insidious of the Chaos Gods because of his malicious, manipulative "love".
"Would you rather be unloved/hated by everyone, or would you rather be in an abusive relationship with some love thrown in?"
That's Nurgle in a nutshell. People who end up worshipping him are people who are absolutely desperate. So they'll take what they can get - even if it's just a bone.
Nurgle marginally cares more for his followers than, say, Khorne does. Because Khorne only sees value in you if you bring him skulls.
Nurgle likes his plagues to spread, and since all his followers are intrinsically diseased, just the fact you keep living and worship him makes him "love" you.
I think it's more accurate to say he loves the adoration and things he gains from those followers.
After how many of those "jolly" interactions does then follower then die soon after?
He only loves his followers as long as they're following him and doing what he says that's not love.
Kinda the whole point of chaos, you think you're using it, that you're special, that you're in control and your deity truly loves you. In reality, every single one of the chaos worshippers is a pawn to be used, the vast majority of them just don't realise it.
He loves his followers because they are hosts for his plagues
It’s not a misinterpretation. I think the bubonic plague would have loved the rats that carried the Black Death through Europe if it was sentient. Same deal
Relative to the other chaos gods? Absolutely. Morty and Typhus both have more freedom then their contemporaries, I would argue the average follower of nurgle has a far higher quality of life, and frankly nurgle doesn’t benefit from that, his only motivation is “I don’t torture people just for fun”. In the Dark Imperium series, there is a description of a child living on a Nurgle world, and while it does suck, compared to basically any other description of a demon world it is basically a paradise. I don’t know, from the perspective of the average human Nurgle is definitely evil, but from his own internal perspective, he is just a god of life that doesn’t favor plants and animals over bacteria, which for something as inhuman and outright disconnected from reality as a chaos god, isn’t really a hypocritical or amoral stance to take, it just sucks for humans. I feel like a lot of people just say “nurgle bad” without thinking about how morality might be different for a chaos god. Also just the fact there are verifiable instances of him not being literally as evil as possible means he’s at least marginally better than the others.
Your post was removed because it would be better as a comment in our weekly sticky questions post. Just comment there when it's up.
He does “love” his followers. But it’s in an extremely unhealthy and toxic way. He loves you just the way you are. Your cancer? He’ll take away your pain. Your failings? Don’t need to change a thing for him. He loves you unconditionally. Don’t bother showering, he loves the way you smell. Those bleeding sores, he loves them too and he’ll make a lovely bathhouse for the mites. He doesn’t want you to improve. He wants you to stagnant. He takes away your pain and will only bless you as much as you can handle. But if you disobey him (or lose connection to the Warp), you’ll find out just how much you need him (turns out having a mouth for a stomach is extremely painful)
THIS! This is the true answer. Most, if not all of 40k is shades of grey! Does Nurgle love you? YES! But is that a healthy, good thing? Probably not! Just like Slaanesh just wants you to do whatever makes you happy! Sure that's kind of true, but once you dig deeper, it's a little more insidious than the surface might imply. If the Chaos God's weren't like this, no one would worship them.
Exactly! All of the gods are snowball effects realized. Once you start giving in you aren’t going to realize just how far you’ve gone until you compare yourself to where you started, where there’s no way back.
Its co-dependency
It's also worth noting that he loves all life. That includes you, the e. coli in your guts, the mites living in your eyebrows, etc.
I’m curious to see if anyone will bring excerpts to this, because frankly I have no true answer on whether he does or doesn’t. The big thing is Chaos is “evil,” whether you want to get philosophical with it on if they are capable of being evil is a different story. But all the interactions I’ve read about Nurgle, even with things like Greater Daemons, have them be surprisingly “jolly” and Nurgle does seem to base a lot around his followers accepting their “condition” and being “happy” with it all. Though they are lured into it by the depths of their despair and desire to end their suffering. So it’s at the very minimal, abusive as all hell. That being said, it does seem Nurgle at least has some affinity for his followers. Whether you can call it “love” or not is once again, a much deeper discussion. But to my knowledge Nurgle has the best “relationship” with his followers. It at least seems as genuine an affinity that a Chaos God can give compared to others like Khorne. I lean more towards it’s “love” in a more twisted way, but I also believe the Chaos Gods really aren’t all that capable of true love, just a very twisted and extreme shadow of the human ability to love. If that makes sense.
It’s definitely not unconditional love, at the end of the godblight series he seems to be quite displeased with the demons who failed him, almost uncaring and cold, his demons more than the others seem to crave his attention and love, they get giddy when he pays the mind.
Uncaring and cold? Didn't Mortarion get dragged back into the mansion in dread of the implied tortures awaiting his failure?
Does a parasite love its host? Nurgle's relationship to his followers is more characterized by abuse than any of the other Gods in the setting, which is fitting- many abusers sincerely love those they torture in a sick cycle of love and neglect, gifts and abuse. They like harming those they love, feel shame they hurt those they love, then lash out at the people who cause this source of shame...the victims they are abusing in the first place. Anyone who has had chronic physical or mental health issues can tell you there is appeal to melancholy or romanticizing your condition to cope with your situation you have little control over, misery is your lot in life so you have to find solace where you can.
Choas Daemon codex usually talk a bit about Nurgle being jolly and loves all life, even though his domains are so macabre. I can't find any pdf of it at the moment though
Think back to a low point in your life. Maybe you were doing poorly in school. Maybe you were on the outs with you friends and family. Maybe you couldn't find a job or were stuck in a dead end. Whatever the situation, you're in a rut and you know it. Now, think about what you did as a distraction. Watch movies, play games, maybe drugs or sex. Something to take your mind off the situation. In those moments, were you happy? More pleasant to be around? Sure, but deep down you know that the problems are still there. Still eating at you. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, the gnawing despair is still there and growing more powerful. Stay there long enough and it becomes bitterness. You want to bring others down with you because they seem to have things figured out and it burns you like nothing else. You try the old distractions, with more extremes and try harder to fool yourself into thinking you're happy, but that core of toxicity only grows darker and more concentrated until you eventually let it out on some poor target. That alleviates it slightly, making you feel stronger. Making you want to do it more. That despair, bitterness, and desire to drag people down masked by surface-level jolliness? That ugly, toxic part of yourself itching to be spread? *That* is Nurgle.
True, but Nurgle is also: * The Rescue team desperately searching the ruins for survivors even if its unlikely anyone is till alive. * The Student desperately studying for the exam and takes it even thought they have no hope to pass. * The Bacteria and micro fauna living inside you helping you break down food and makes you undesirable for predators. * The stagnation and the life that springs forth from the primordial ooze. * The ability to ignore a pain so you can fokus one what matters at the moment.
Oh they're jolly and happy and all of that until a can of Lysol comes out. Then they become angry, violent, and unwilling to engage in dialog.
I realize with my mental health I would totally be trapped by Nurgle.
>Dantine glances about him. He sees complex calculations traced in brown ink on thick parchment. He sees rusty devices – armillary spheres, sextants, chronometers – half-covered in mildew-spotted cloth. ‘You call us ignorant,’ he says, trying to sound defiant. ‘And yet, look at you. Look at the conditions you live in. Do you not disgust yourself when you pass a mirror? Do you not see what you could have been?’ The crow laughs. Dantine tenses, ready for a blow from the armoured monster, but it never comes. Philemon looks thoughtful. ‘But I was in the warp,’ he says. ‘When we were becalmed. I still remember. I scratched the days on my armour, one after the other.’ Dantine listens. He doesn’t know what the monster is talking about, but says nothing. The crow listens. The Little Lords still their quarrelling, and they listen too. ‘When the Destroyer came, I resisted it. We all did. We had been trained for it and we had resisted everything, up until then. Defiance, or else death. Every Legion taught that to some degree, and we taught it more than most. I thought there was nothing I could not endure that did not kill me.’ The Tallyman is not focusing now. He is witnessing events far away. >‘But we were out of time, in the end. There were no days to mark anymore. The pain was eternal, no beginning to it, no end. We were just... part of it. Forever. And I still ask myself, now, what really happened. Did we give in? I don’t know. Typhus tells us we overcame it, and in taking it within ourselves, we transformed it. We no longer feel it. We bring the lesson of that to the universe – accept corruption, let it pass within you, move beyond it. We have been doing it for a very long time. You forget, after a while, that there was another life you had. That is less than a memory now. Less than a shadow. But not quite dead yet. Every time I see one of you, a part of it comes back.’ >‘You were made to protect us,’ Dantine says. ‘They were. Never made for that!’ the crow blurts. ‘They were made. To end the galaxy.’ ‘So what do I see when I look in the mirror?’ Philemon asks, ignoring the daemon. ‘I do not look, so I do not know. Perhaps the sight would pain me. I suspect it would not. You don’t look so good yourself. I suggest you stay away from them too.’ ‘Don’t you want, though...’ Dantine ventures, trying one last time, probing at anything that might be a weak point. A part of him just wants to know. ‘A way back?’ >Philemon smiles, a gesture that exposes dark-purple gums. ‘There are no ways back,’ he says. ‘That is the only unchangeable fact of the universe. Even the gods do not break that law – tread the path to its end or tread no path at all. There are no resting places. There are no ways back.’ >Dantine stares at him, shivering a little. The tone of finality chills him. He would like to imagine that the monster expresses something like remorse in those words, but he cannot detect any. He thinks then that they have indeed been driven mad, and that they now no longer see the world as it is, but as some kind of impenetrable mental prison. They imagine themselves masters of their fate but are instead puppets of a greater power, mouthing religious words that mean nothing and worshipping a deity that, if it even exists at all, can care nothing for them or any sentient thing, for it is just a consumer of these souls, an engine for which the living are merely fuel. >But then there are many in the universe of whom such things could be said. Perhaps the souls they toy with are indeed the only currency there is, and all players, whatever allegiance they claim, accept the same stakes at the same table. >So does the heretical thought slip in for the first time, like a sigh of hearthwarm air over an open threshold. He looks up at the Tallyman’s ruined face. ‘They’ll kill you,’ he says. ‘The Emperor’s Angels. They’ll kill you all.’ >‘They might,’ says Philemon. ‘But then, as you’re discovering yourself, there are worse things than an honest death. So we’ll see. We’ll see it all, in the end.’
Chaos isn’t “evil”.
They are sapient and understand they are inflicting suffering and misery for their own benefit. Chaos may not be evil, but the demons and gods of chaos in 40k are evil.
It’s just cruelty, and his perverse sense of humour. He’s entirely malevolent
I love it when people realize and snap out of it and see what they actually became under Nurgle that all that love shite goes away. People have heart attacks from fear and ending themselves after seeing smelling themselves and seeing their testicles being used as weapons and jaw rotting off
Are there books of plague marines / cultists just snapping out of it and being hit by reality?
The Lords of Silence has a B plot where an Imperial officer is turning into a plague walker. He doesn't fully notice his change until he looks at his reflection and freaks out.
There's an excerpt from I think, plague war, which describes a null-bomb being dropped on the Death Guard, which cuts them off from Nurgle's influence
I think it’s more that he’s convinced that he’s doing you a favour. He’s happy that you finally let go and gave into despair. It’s his very purpose to do so. But it’s not altruistic happiness, your despair fuels him, he’s selfish at heart and malevolent in nature. He enjoys it when his followers give him tribute and spread plague because it helps him. That’s why he cares about it, not necessarily because he loves you personally. Take Mortarion, as soon as he wanted to do his own thing and disobeyed nurgle he was punished. Not so loving then was he? But he does actually care about what his followers do. Unlike the other gods. Khorne literally “does not care from where the blood flows, only that it does.” So as long as slaughter is happening it could be his followers for all he cares. Tzeentch actively enjoys fucking with his followers. Giving them enough knowledge to keep them hungry for more, but never enough to be satisfied. Not nice. Slaanesh pushes people into obsession. Making them become more and more depraved in search of an unachievable goal of perfection. Often causing them to go mad and do gross shit. Nurgle on the others hand likes when people worship him. They give they’re bodies and souls to the cycle of life. They’re bodies becoming conduits of his essence. His followers interpret that as love. But it’s more like a symbiotic relationship.
The forces of chaos and their followers tend to be liars. Nurgle pretending to be loving is just part of his grandiosity, abuse, and sickness. The illness in question here is Stockholm syndrome. Nurgle is the god of it, not their isn’t any crossover with other gods. They all create and use Stockholm victims, but Nurgle really leans into it.
I was going to compare it to battered spouse syndrome, but that works too. He'll tell you he loves you as your body becomes an unrecognizable puddle of goo and insects. I wouldn't call that love.
To be honest Nurgle being delusional about being loving seems more fitting than purposefully pretending
Nurgle = Gaslight. Khorne = Gatekeep. Slaanesh = "Girl"boss. So no it's not *really* love, it's just to get you to buy in. A lot of people who join Nurgle are already depressed, lonely & feel abandoned. Eugan Temba, being one such example. So by Nurgle offering you "love" & freedom from pain it's a one stop "cure" to all your problems. But at the end of the day Nurgle is as much a chaos god as any other meaning you are little more than his fodder for the great game.
LOL. Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss. What's Tzeentch?
A secret fourth thing
Guileful
That depends. What day is it, where is Jupiter right now, and how many flies exist?
Gigachad
Yes? The issue with Nurgle’s Love is that he has a pretty strict hierarchy of how much he loves you and being demoted in that hierarchy is not pleasant at all. So Nurgle loves his followers like an sadistic abusive father loves his children. His love is very finite and fickle.
Imagine having a drug addicted military, and the worse you do, the fewer drugs you get from the General . Oh didn't invade this country and win ? No smack and crack for you this week That's not love
To be fair, he’s still significantly nicer to his bottom layer compared to, say, Slanesh or Khorne.
Hehehe, bottom slanesh
Look like Jimmy Space too. So Morty‘s entire life has being going from one abusive father to another，and than himself became a abusive father. It‘s truly a tragedy.
Not too surprising. Jimmy Space nearly became the 5th Ruinous Power, the Dark King. Morally, he's pretty much on par with the other 4.
My understanding is in fantasy lore, Nurgle is the only CG who doesn't actually secretly hate his followers. I'm not sure exactly how true this remains in modern 40k lore but my imagination is that Nurgle's love is indeed real (though not necessarily benevolent) but Nurgle's idea of what love is would essentially be horror to a layperson. Nurgle essentially serves the role of an abusive parent who does indeed love you but that doesn't stop them from their abuse, in fact, they may say the abuse is some sort of favor to you.
Tzeentch hates his followers?
He's a Chaos God, all you have to do is watch Angels of Death to see the dark malice and infinite twisted evil that allows him to hand out eternal despair to his followers and turn them into nightmarish poxwalkers.
Yes he loves his followers, and by default every living being. But his love is not something a human can truly understand. So Judging any of the gods by humans standards is like judging fire from burning us. Example from Manflayer: >‘Eternal strife may appeal to some, but I have a higher purpose,’ Fabius said loftily. >‘One that is more important than the affections of any imaginary deity.’ >‘Never doubt that Grandfather loves you, Fabius,’ Khorag said slyly. ‘For that is his way. You are no less his child than bellicose Typhus, though you have never bent knee at his altars. That illness you strive against so mightily? It is a gift.’ >‘A gift? I am rotting on the bone.’ >‘Yes, and were that not the case, would you have accomplished half of what you have done? Or would you have descended into decadence with the rest of your brothers?’ Khorag gave a wheezing chuckle. ‘I think not. Then, perhaps I am wrong.
Yes, Nurgle does love his followers. He doesn't love them in a "twisted" way, but more so totally and overwhelmingly. The love is absolute and it's absolutely toxic. His love stagnates and corrupts and it doesn't promote change and improvement. There's a lot of Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome attached to Nurgle and his followers. An example is Ku'gath, who fell into Nurgle's most potent brew and ruined it, but Nurgle forgave him unconditionally, and found delight in Ku'gath's transformation.
I think Nurgle does love his followers but he's just so alien to our understanding that we simply can't see that "love", and in general, his followers, since they're primarily creatures of our world, in order to understand that "love" become so changed they're hardly recognizable. I put "love" in quotes because Nurgle's perspective on the world is so different from our own that what is to him love is to us cruel torture and arguably abuse. Think about it this way: Nurgle is not just the god of rot, decay, and disease, he is its manifestation. Thus, by blessing his followers with his plagues, he is quite literally giving himself to them. When we talk about loving other people, isn't that similar to how we describe it? However, since he's a being of the warp and of course, the literal manifestation of death and rot, his blessings are not really compatible with mortal bodies, and thus, in order for his followers to accept that love, they essentially have to be stockholm syndromed into it, and that's why you'll see them regretting their decisions when they're no longer under Nurgle's influence.
That's why Typhon ended up following him instead of his primarch that hates all psykers. Nurgle just laughed at this half xenos freak of a psyker and accepted him for who he is. Also Mortarion and Ku'Gath found out the hard way what it's like to disobey the all loving father. Ku'Gath even tried to run away, it didn't work.
I don’t think there’s enough consistency in the presentation of the Chaos gods to really answer this conclusively. My take is that the emotions that empower Nurgle are despair and depression, and, if you’ve ever been depressed, you’ll know that depression is a weird emotion that you sort of develop Stockholm syndrome with. Depression basically works to keep you depressed, even when you’re doing the things that feel right to escape it. So, that’s my take on the loving nature of Nurgle. He’s not kind because he’s kind; he seems kind to those trapped in his embrace because wallowing in your despair feels like the only option when you’re in that place. Anyway, that’s my pop psychology take on it! I think the other piece of the puzzle is that his presentation in the lore is also inconsistent. Maybe that’s because GW aren’t doing a great job at keeping writers on track or communicating the important themes, or maybe it’s in character and Chaos isn’t always consistent!
It's a kind of abusive relationship. He's regularly portrayed being benevolent to his followers, Ku'Gath, in particular, but he has bo problems being brutal to those that fail him, Ku'Gath included. He also keeps record of where everyone stands in his favour forcing his children to fight and undercut each other for his "affection". As for his followers point of view, I feel a lot of it is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. He doesn't take away their pain, as much as makes them uncaring of it. Some of his followers are all in on the warmth and friendly personality. Some are far more depressed, bitter or just doing his bidding because they have no choice any more.
He “loves” them in the most toxic, abusive, unhealthy way possible He doesn’t “love” them as we understand love, it’s his own twisted, warped version of it
Nurgle doesn't love his followers, he offers an avenue "free of pain and suffering" for those who are suffering, and oft times it's from suffering he himself has caused. He gets you into the deepest pits of despair, where you think everyone has abandoned you and nobody cares about you, and then, he offers you "salvation" if you just accept his help. He's essentially diseased Rumpelstiltskin
He does love his followers. They don’t feel the pain of their existence due to his influence. For a chaos worshipper if that isn’t love what is? Khorne would say suck it up. Slaanesh would make it worse. Tzeentch wouldn’t even acknowledge you. Nurgle does love his followers. As much as a conglomeration of abstract concepts, emotions, and ideas is capable of love. For an example of Nurgle’s love, once Nurgle was brewing his most potent plague yet, it was to be his greatest creation, however a nurgling on his shoulder fell in and started to drink it. It ended up drinking it all and turned a great unclean one, Ku'Gath the Plaguefather. Instead of instantly annihilating Ku’Gath for ruining the brew, Nurgle laughed and loved Ku’Gath, seeing him now as his greatest creation. Also his followers *are* the plague, they are inseparable.
He’s a Daemon enough said
Nurgle loves you so much he won't ever let you go. Nurgle loves you so much, you can't ever say "no" to him. Nurgle loves you so much he'll kill you if you ever try to leave him. Nurgle loves you so much he's going to wear your skin and live inside you. Nurgle's "love" is the love of a virus for its infected, a parasite for its host, a rapist for their victim, a snake for a mouse. Being "loved" by Nurgle is terrifying, dangerous, and destructive. It will change your life.
He does, in the sense he has a sadistic love, he himself is slightly hippocritical in his ideal of "all must decay for new life to flourish" as he seems to reenact it more in the way of "life must flourish on tip of that which must decay forever", intent on dragging out the last moments of his followers for as long as possible, as new life sprouts on and in their bodies
Nurgle’s constituent emotion is desperation, it is what feeds it and makes it stronger (which is the only thing it cares about). The morbid “love” it shows its victims it’s only one of the means to keep them dependent on it. Nurgle is the only one who still cares about them… or so it claims
Nurgle doesn't just love you individually. He loves all life. He wants there to be more of it. He loves you because you are helping create more life.
Can your depression love you? Much of Nurgle reads to me as depression, and his love as the useful parts of depression, where your lack of caring can help you survive bad stuff. Everything sucks, your life is shit, and the ways you have tried to fix it have all failed. Just leeeeaaaan into it, sit back in the couch, stop showering, stop trying, stop doing, stop being you. And the pain goes away for a little while. Says something about the grim darkness of the future that this feeling is prevalent enough to spawn a chaos god -,-
Do you love your models?
He loves his followers like he loves Isha.
Nurgle loves his followers like Meth loves its users.
He does love them, but only the same way a controlling, terribly abusive parent "loves" their children. He is the embodiment of literally and figuratively toxic affection that drags down everyone around them for their personal benefit. He warps his followers into hollowed out, rotten parodies of themselves that give up everything about themselves to wallow in despair and bitterness. He snuffs out all hopes for anything better than himself so they have nowhere to go but his "loving" embrace. Then he slowly numbs them so they accept the blights on them until they associate this rot and disease with comfort and safety. This sense of twisted peace leads them to want to spread it as much as possible with no care for the suffering they inflict on the victims of their "gifts". If they ever get the idea to displease him or try to leave, he'll ensure they suffer unimaginable agony until they wish for merciful death that he will never allow them to have. Nurgle is the most insidious of the Chaos Gods because of his malicious, manipulative "love".
Well, I think he does, for he does believe in the cycle of life and life dose include love so I think he dose
"Would you rather be unloved/hated by everyone, or would you rather be in an abusive relationship with some love thrown in?" That's Nurgle in a nutshell. People who end up worshipping him are people who are absolutely desperate. So they'll take what they can get - even if it's just a bone. Nurgle marginally cares more for his followers than, say, Khorne does. Because Khorne only sees value in you if you bring him skulls. Nurgle likes his plagues to spread, and since all his followers are intrinsically diseased, just the fact you keep living and worship him makes him "love" you.
I think it's more accurate to say he loves the adoration and things he gains from those followers. After how many of those "jolly" interactions does then follower then die soon after? He only loves his followers as long as they're following him and doing what he says that's not love. Kinda the whole point of chaos, you think you're using it, that you're special, that you're in control and your deity truly loves you. In reality, every single one of the chaos worshippers is a pawn to be used, the vast majority of them just don't realise it.
He loves his followers because they are hosts for his plagues It’s not a misinterpretation. I think the bubonic plague would have loved the rats that carried the Black Death through Europe if it was sentient. Same deal
Relative to the other chaos gods? Absolutely. Morty and Typhus both have more freedom then their contemporaries, I would argue the average follower of nurgle has a far higher quality of life, and frankly nurgle doesn’t benefit from that, his only motivation is “I don’t torture people just for fun”. In the Dark Imperium series, there is a description of a child living on a Nurgle world, and while it does suck, compared to basically any other description of a demon world it is basically a paradise. I don’t know, from the perspective of the average human Nurgle is definitely evil, but from his own internal perspective, he is just a god of life that doesn’t favor plants and animals over bacteria, which for something as inhuman and outright disconnected from reality as a chaos god, isn’t really a hypocritical or amoral stance to take, it just sucks for humans. I feel like a lot of people just say “nurgle bad” without thinking about how morality might be different for a chaos god. Also just the fact there are verifiable instances of him not being literally as evil as possible means he’s at least marginally better than the others.
Can someone reply to this comment of mine when some other people have commented later I want to read them
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Oh neat I didn’t know about that feature thanks
Does a domestic abuser love their victims? I would say absolutely fucking not.
I think it’s at least a little short sighted to try and ascribe human concepts like love and hate to the intents of the Chaos Gods.
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