I just realized why my love for the Iron Warriors and (pre-Heresy) Emperor's Children
They're both particularly tragic Legions.
The Iron Warriors took the shit jobs of the Great Crusade, and usually not particularly willingly -- they got the scraps nobody else wanted. But they soldiered forth in mud, blood, and filth for centuries, enduring grueling conditions and horrible losses, carrying the essential battles of the Crusade on their backs without hope of recognition or glory. Their successes were never validated, their losses in achieving those successes never recognized. Meanwhile all that time, they got to watch the other legions who did NOT endure such hellish conditions get the glory and adulation of the Imperium. And it broke them. And when Horus promised them a beloved place in his New World Order, the Iron Warriors, utterly starved for love and recognition of their efforts and their losses, joined him... only to be treated EXACTLY THE SAME WAY under the Heretic Regime. And it broke them again.
And I look at this long-suffering legion, these scrappy survivalists, and can't help but go "I see your successes and your sacrifices. I care. ...but did you guys SERIOUSLY have to commit to that whole Daemonculaba bit? Because seriously, that was fucking disgusting."
Meanwhile, the Emperor's Children were dealt such a bad hand at the start, with only a few hundred viable marines, and yet Fulgrim took them and made them the pride of the Adeptus Astartes, so much so that they were called the Emperor's Children. They were the apex, the very finest. They embodied all the best of what it meant to be a Space Marine... and then Chaos brought them crashing down SO HARD and SO FAST that, just a few years after their fall, they weren't even soldiers anymore, just a bunch of drug-fueled hedonists rampaging across the Galaxy looking for their next forbidden high. By the time of the Siege of Terra, they barely committed anything to the battle because they were too busy grinding up random people to turn them into space cocaine -- there was no way that as blitzed and as high as they were that they were going to have the coherency of mind to even know what the intended strategy even WAS.
Their tragedy was that they were the highest, the best and brightest, and nobody crashed lower. They don't even have any real pride in themselves anymore. It's all about the next thrill, the next fix. All they care about is getting another experience to set their hearts pumping again, and they don't care how it happens. How far the mighty, how high the paragon, has fallen.
