Honsou

Honsou. The evilest motherfucker in all of Warhammer 40,000.

Honsou is a Warsmith of the Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marines. Honsou is also very possibly the evilest villain in the known galaxy. And he gets shit done. Evil shit.

Honsou's Blotter In Brief

• Siege of Hydra Cordatus – Honsou ransacked an Imperial Fists gene-seed cache and became a Warsmith of the Iron Warriors traitor legion.
• The Horrors of Medrengard – Medrengard was Honsou's planetary base in the Eye of Terror from where he headed the unfathomably evil Daemonculaba project using the stolen gene-seed. At the same time he fought off the Grand Companies of two rival Warsmiths, killing one and absorbing his army. The good horrific times came to an end when an Ultramarine by the name of Uriel Ventris showed up and freed a bloodthirster bound to the Warsmith's fortress. This resulted in the near-total destruction of both his fortress and his forces, but not before the Daemonculaba spits out a clone of Ventris dubbed "the Newborn". Thus began an obsession in Honsou...
• Genocide at Tarsis Ultra – The Ultramarines spent years and countless resources and lives to repel a Tyranid incursion at Tarsis Ultra. So what did Honsou do a few months afterward? He murdered EVERY living thing on the planet using biological weapons dispatched via orbital bombardment. Honsou thus killed billions and rendered a planet a lifeless rock out of spite for a single Ultramarine, rather than to achieve a strategic purpose.
• The Skull Harvest – From the heart of the Maelstrom, it's the EVILEST CHAMPION OF THE GALAXY contest!! Last man standing is declared the evilest and has the right to lead the Chaos warbands of the slain losers! Thus, by murdering a few dozen opponents in the arena, he garnered a force of 17,000 warriors composed of Chaos Space Marines, pirates, and xenos.
• The Daemon Prince M'kar – after slaughtering the occupants of a secret Ultramarines star fort, Honsou released the Daemon Prince M'kar the Reborn from his confinement. M'kar then daemonically possessed and desecrated an armoured Ultramarines Dreadnought to aid Honsou in his dark designs.
• Assault on Ultramar – With his army (dubbed the "Bloodborn" by M'kar, a name the Warsmith hated) Honsou embarked on a quest to destroy all of Ultramar. Honsou himself leads the assault on Calth, Ventris's homeworld, with orders from M'kar to destroy the lost Tomb of Remus Ventanus, who lead the defense of Calth during the Horus Heresy and was rediscovered by Ventris as a child. Taking a look at Ventanus's sarcophagus, Honsou finds the Shard of Erebus, a ritual knife, and Honsou realizes that M'kar fears the weapon. Confronting Ventris at the tomb with his bodyguard, the Iron Warriors nearly overwhelm the Ultramarines and Raven Guard when all of a sudden the Legion of the Damned show up and start using the Iron Warriors as target practice, and the ghost of Remus Ventanus seriously injuries Honsou in the battle. Rather than let Ventris kill him, Honsou activates the bombs that destroy the tomb. The Ultramarines ultimately beat back the Bloodborn, and Marneus Calgar kills M'kar with the Shard of Erebus, but not before the invasion killed a third of the Chapter. Honsou escaped and presently remains at large. Thus he exists as an ever-looming danger to the Ultramarines and the Imperium of Man...

Evil in the Extreme

Evil and villainy are ever-present in the 41st millennium. But what is it that makes Honsou possibly the evilest villain in all of Warhammer 40,000...?

Consider first that an action can be recognized as being exceptionally evil in one of two ways. Regarding the first way, an action can cause huge and vast amounts of damage. Regarding the second way, an action might affect a relatively limited number of persons, but if it was carried out in a manner that was particularly cruel, sadistic, vile, inhumane, or outright fucked-up, then it might qualify as exceptionally evil as well.

Most arch-villains are notorious for their evil in only one of the two ways. Horus, for instance, unleashed a civil war within the Imperium that resulted in the deaths of trillions. But, even though many of his actions did contain a significant degree of cruelty, compared to all the other sadistic deeds that had been carried out by evil entities over the years, nothing he did stood out as being exceptionally vile. Conversely, consider the Haemonculi of the Dark Eldar. The Haemonculi are masters at the art of torture with a reputation for skinning their victims on a given day, and grinding their bones and organs into narcotics the very next (with their victims, in either event, remaining alive for as long as the Haemonculi are able to prolong). But, for all their sadism, the sheer numbers of victims for any individual Haemonculus rarely exceeds the thousands.

Honsou holds one of the highest scores for BOTH classes of evil. Regarding cruelty, Honsou had been the one to oversee the Daemonculaba. The Daemonculaba process was a means by which to produce new Chaos Space Marines entailing a shocking myriad of cruelties including, among other things, skinning people alive and forcibly impregnating women via reverse c-sections.

Regarding the amount of damage he wrought, Honsou murdered billions at Tarsis Ultra and rendered the entire planet a lifeless rock – for the sole purpose of maliciously spiting a rival.

Add to this, Honsou is only a Chaos Space Marine. He isn't a god borne of the stars; he doesn't possess psyker abilities; nor is he a creature of the warp whose very existence comes from evil. Thus, given what he has done in spite of his 'limitations,' it is easy to see why Honsou might very well be the evilest villain to roam the galaxy...