The Personality of Perturabo
Graham McNeill presents him in “Angel Exterminatus” as a vastly intelligent, very meticulous man who resented his legion’s treatment at the Emperor’s hands. However, in that same novel he is also shown to fit neatly in both ends of the Rage Spectrum. On one hand you get the subtle rage, where Perturabo buys hundreds of house-sized paintings of his own men and has them all burned. On the other hand he’s also prone to fits of destructive rage, whereby after Fulgrim fucked around one too many times, Pert invited Fulgrim into his inner sanctum and just smashed his pretty face into the guts of a clockwork Warhound Scout Titan. Another indicator of his personality was Perturabo’s possessions, as he had many wonders of engineering; that Warhound was intricate, made of dozens of hundreds of thousands of tiny parts, and fully-functional, complete with the ability to move and fire miniature laser cannons. He also had schematics of huge, wondrous buildings that he was the architect of, and a clockwork Phoenix that he spent over a century constructing by hand and even wrote the code of an AI from scratch for it.
About that painting: The painting in question that he had destroyed was one that showed a Legion Apothecary administering the Emperor’s Mercy to an Iron Warrior, in the mud and grimy fields of a conquered fortress. In the background of the painting there was an Imperial Fists flag waving over the fortress. This just shows that Perturabo possesses an all-consuming hatred for Dorn, and in every waking moment he lives, breathes, and shits the thought that Dorn is somehow better than him. He hates himself for this.
Angel Exterminatus was an absolute crime against Perturabo. Credit goes to McNeil for his grand attempt to humanize the minds of the most mentally inhuman Primarchs, but Occam’s Razor applies here, as it always does in the mindset of the Iron Lord. Simplicity is the key, expedience the goal. His is a mind entirely composed of mathematical equations, looking at the world around him in angles and percentages, statistics and numbers. Emotion is unwelcome, an unfactorable variable, but it’s always there, the ghost that haunts his finely tuned thoughts. He buried his dreams and his heart on Olympia’s ridges, and then willingly cut all ties and dived into Hell, because his Father asked him to. He murdered millions, because his father asked him to. He broke empires, shattered armies, and his Legion bore the most grievous wounds and losses, because his father asked him to. And he ignored the implications of it all, because his Father asked him to.
Do you honestly believe none of this ground into his long lost humanity, the empty core of his being that he cut out, because his Father asked him to?
He is War-Broken. We’re talking about God-Level traumatic mental disorder here. Perturabo can’t control his emotions at times. He stares out at nothingness, and speaks to his past. One moment, he’s unreachable, and the next he’s ripping your head off because you brought him bad news. He can become utterly lost in fine details, both in crafting weaponry, and tearing down citadels. It calms him, returns his mind back to the emotionless numbers that represent hundreds of thousands of his sons dying. The further detached he became from reality, the further he tried to hide from the horror he was crafting, the worse his emotions got.
And Perturabo still buried that shit. He moved forward. He got the damn job done, and the next, and the next, with precise equations and algorithms.
Olympia was the line crossed. His mind broke, his heart broke, and he became the Monster he ran from his whole life.
Because his Father asked him to.
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