Editing Angron (section)

===Early Life===
[[File:Past-Angron-art.jpg|300px|right|thumb|You'd be pissed off too if your dad didn't let you avenge your dog.]]
{{Topquote|I was born in blood, raised in darkness and I shall die free!|Angron, to the Nucerian High Riders and their armies}}
Angron has good reason to be ever-so-slightly miffed: his early life was one big bowl of shit after another. First he crash-landed on his new home [[Nuceria|world]] (because Khorne didn't give him a soft landing) and had a good chunk of his head torn off in the crash, after which he got jumped by the aforementioned Eldar, then (tired from the killing and the massive brain trauma --keep in mind he was like 6 hours old) got captured and sold into slavery by people with near-Imperial level technology before making him fight as a gladiator for their entertainment. He also appears to have been either the least intelligent of his brothers, or else that head injury he took while crashing did a number on his intellect. For Angron attempted to escape from his captors numerous times even before his implantation with the Nails but somehow was recaptured each time. Remember, these guys were just baseline humans with no outstanding tech aside from a few odds and ends like the Nails. Also keep in mind that more than a few of these attempts occurred when he was fully mature, and thus should have been leagues beyond what even a Custodes would be capable of in terms of physical and mental prowess. The fact that he somehow managed to ''fail'' in repeatedly attempting to escape from a bunch of normal humans is actually far more unbelievable than if he had succeeded.

A later retcon revealed he was a decent guy who loved his fellow gladiators, but after an incident where he refused to kill his adoptive father in the arenas, his masters proceeded to replace part of his brain with ARCHAEOTECH SHIT (originally this happened before he fully grew up) that drove him so mad that he murdered his dad regardless, cueing a massive bout of despair. The stuff they stuck in his head would later be called ''"The Butcher's Nails"'', and, though never fully understood (even after the Emprah's best techs took a look), they constantly applied pain to his brain and made it so the only time he could feel anything resembling happiness was while murdering shit. It should also be noted that they go from excruciating to normal, and ''do not'' [[Slaanesh|deal with the pleasure centers of the brain.]] In other words, this pertains to actual negative reinforcement in classical conditioning.

After years of being a slave, fighting through the gladiator pits and becoming the best of them, Angron eventually set up and led a rebellion, fighting to free his brother and sister gladiators. This would make him 40k's answer to Spartacus, the same way Curze is 40k Batman. He and the gladiators terrorized the planet's population for a while, burning down cities and generally making a mess of things. However, due undoubtedly in no small part to the Nails (and the high probability that Angron was a bit of an idiot anyway), he didn't attack the Nucerian ruling classes with anything approaching a coherent strategy. There was seemingly no plan, only wanton destruction. As a result, the rulers of the various parts of the planet sent their militaries to gang up on Angron's comparatively ragtag group of about 2000 and after a few years, Angron's force had been reduced to half and was surrounded by at least seven full scale armies. So he and his buddies were completely screwed, making Angron the only Primarch who failed to conquer his home planet, something that his Legion would end up being more than a little embarrassed by.

Around that time, the Emperor showed up, and hashed out a deal with the local planetary government in order to expedite Angron's capture and win over the planet without any further bloodshed, because there was no point in the Emperor helping his son win a (totally justified) war against a population that had already submitted to compliance. Of course, this deal required the Emperor to take Angron away from the only people who weren't shitty to him and leaving them all to die; but Big E didn't give a rat's ass about those fuckers (and they were all summarily executed, as you would expect in a slave rebellion). Naturally, he didn't tell Angron any of this, because <s>he couldn't give less of a shit</s> [[Aaron Dembski-Bowden]] wanted to make the Emperor look like an ass again. Daddy issues don't make for bad writing by themselves, but said good writing is harder to write without nuance and depth. Of course, the Emperor could have saved them all or simply kill the local slavers who were, despite compliance, flying in the face of the law of the Great Crusade, give Angron the planet as a recruiting world and take the slaves to his ship to be made into a loyal ass-wrecking rapetrain of AWESOME alongside all the Terran legionnaires. Buuuut we need our dose of our [[Edgy]] [[Grimdark]] here, right?

So long story short, the Emperor told Angron he was coming along on the Great Crusade, Angron told him that he would rather die alongside his fellow gladiators, and the Emperor beamed him up onto his ship and left all the other gladiators to die. On the ship, Angron completely lost his shit and started attacking everything around him, managing to kill one of the Custodes before Big E force gripped him into submission and basically told him to get over himself (AD-B, seriously fuck you). After this, Angron was apparently taken back to Terra to be examined by the Emperor and his best tech adepts in the hope of finding a way to fix Angron's mutilated brain.

Back on [[Terra]], the Big E summoned [[Arkhan Land]] to his labs, as he had some experience with devices like Butcher's Nails; Land had been the one to seal the Hexarchion Vaults on Mars, and had encountered more crudely built versions of the Nails there. As a mildly interesting sidenote, Land called the Butcher's Nails ''Cruciamen'', which is perhaps their Dark Age name. Anyway, the Emperor showed Angron to Land spread out with his skull hacked open & brain exposed on a surgery table, taking a good look at Angron's fucked-up skull and decided that he was a waste of time and effort, and arrived at the conclusion that even trying to remove them would likely kill him (reference "Betrayer"). The Mechanicus estimated that he wouldn't live long enough to see the end of the Great Crusade.

It is during this procedure that it is revealed just how completely the Nails destroyed Angron, and how thoroughly tortured he would be for the rest of his existence. According to the Emperor in conversation with Arkhan;

<blockquote>''"With the alterations made to the limbic lobe and insular cortex, the surgeons have impaired the Twelfth’s ability to regulate any emotion at all. Furthermore, they have rethreaded its capacity to take pleasure in anything but the sensation of anger. They are the only chemicals and electrical signals that flow freely through, and from, its brain. All else is either dulled to nothingness or rewired to inspire a supreme degree of agony. It is a testament to the durability of my primarch project that the Twelfth has managed to survive this long.

''"His own emotions cause him pain?"''

''"No, Arkhan. Everything. Everything causes it pain. Thinking. Feeling. Breathing. The only respite it has is in the rewired neurological pleasure it receives from the chemicals of anger and aggression."''</blockquote>

Aaand it gets worse. The Emperor then reveals a few moments later that Angron's limbic and insular lobes had been straight up removed and replaced with parts of the Nails. This essentially meant that Angron would not have been capable of feeling empathy or compassion, and it would have completely restructured his ability to link behaviors to outcomes (ie this behavior makes me feel good vs this behavior makes me feel bad). Even his sense of self awareness and IQ would have been affected, which would go far in explaining quite a lot of straight up retarded crap he would go on to do. So essentially the slave masters of Nuceria took away his compassion, his empathy, his emotional control, his intelligence, and his ability to learn or feel anything pleasant outside of aggression. Oh, and left him in constant agony whenever he wasn't angry. Scratch the Emperor being a dick for not removing the Nails, He was more of a dick for not just putting Angron down then and there (though the fact He refers to Angron only as "Twelfth" and "it" is shown the Emprah is not too hot on compassion, at least as far as Angron seems to be concerned). The most tragic part of it all was that apparently Angron was quite the bro-tier Primarch before the Nails were implanted. He even had the ability to empathically soothe the pain of others by taking it upon himself (almost certainly some latent psychic ability), and he very often did just that for his fellow slaves. So on top of everything else, the Nails completely destroyed Angron's personality, taking him from a potentially Vulkan level nice guy and lowering him to Perturabo levels of barbarity. To top it all off, the Nails had been designed for use on baseline humans. As a Primarch, Angron's brain was not only far more complex than that of an ordinary human, but had the capacity for wholescale regeneration. This would only cause him more problems however, as the damaged or missing parts of his brain attempted to regenerate around the Nails. It was believed that this process would eventually cause him to lose all ability to control himself, and that he would become little more than a rabid animal as some of his legionaries would later demonstrate. At that point, is was almost certain that he would manage to get himself killed in one way or another.
 
Considering that later during the Horus Heresy, '''Menes Kalliston''' of the [[Thousand Sons]] was fairly certain that their [[psyker]]-medics could figure out how to remove them from [[Khârn|a certain swell guy]], it is possible that the Emperor - being the most intelligent person in the [[Imperium]] and the most powerful psyker ever - ''<u>could</u>'' have achieved it if He put some resources into it (especially since at least one AdMech replaced everything, including his brain with machine parts); or it's equally likely the Thousand Son space marine was just stalling because he had an insane psycho-killer moments away from killing him breathing down his neck. It is however, far more likely that the Nails implanted into the World Eaters were not so difficult to remove as Angron's would have been. Entire vital parts of Angron's brain had been removed and replaced with the crude cybernetics of the Nails, whereas the World Eaters' Nails were knockoffs which were simply added on to their existing brain tissue. Because of Angron's brain being a half-cybernetic mess, both the Emperor and Arkhan believed that the Nails were, ironically, the only reason Angron was still alive. In fact, the Emperor admitted to Land that he ''could'' remove the Nails under normal circumstances. However, as previously stated, parts of Angron's mutilated brain had both been completely replaced by the Nails and had regenerated around the Nails. If they were removed, Angron's brain would almost certainly have simply ceased to function. Additionally, attempting to replace parts of a Primarch is almost certainly a borderline-impossible task, particularly if that part is a brain. The Primarchs were not just flesh and blood, but creatures of the warp incarnated by the Emperor's genecraft. Whatever the Emperor did to create them, He clearly could not just do it on a whim as He could with Custodes or Astartes. There were only ever 20 ([[Omegon|21]]) of them and even when two were erased from history mid-Crusade, they were not replaced. The Emperor also never seemed to consider the possibility of making more of them after the initial scattering when they were presumed dead, despite the massive blow that killing all 20 Primarchs would have dealt to his plans.

Regardless however, Arkhan described the Emperor as being "inhumanly toneless" when speaking of Angron, and as being "passionlessly interested" in the surgical nightmare that Angron had become. Whether this is due to Him genuinely not caring or simply being too far beyond Arkhan for His attitude to be understood properly is up for debate. Rather strangely, the Emperor appeared to have been unusually callous when it came to Angron in particular, as even Primarchs like Konrad Curze, Perturabo and Mortarion were shown at least ''some'' level of love and interest from Him. However Angron, for whatever reason, was disregarded almost entirely. Regarding this anomaly, it is worth noting that Angron was the only Primarch who did not end up ruling his native planet. The other Primarchs either conquered theirs or used their charisma and intelligence to work their way up the hierarchy of whatever planet they landed on (or both). Angron failed to do either, and was on the verge of being slaughtered along with his army when the Emperor came for him. Perhaps this failure is why the Emperor seemed so uniquely disinterested in him. It is also entirely possible that the Emperor simply wrote Angron off after realizing that there was nothing he could feasibly do to help him. All the previously mentioned Primarchs were damaged goods in one way or another, but they were all at least physically and mentally functional, whereas Angron simply was not. Not only that, but he was the only Primarch to ''reject'' the Emperor's recruitment efforts outright. This seemingly did not please Big E overmuch, as after Angron had been teleported to the Emperor's flagship and killed the Custode, he said to the Emperor that he was now nothing but a ghost without his comrades. The Emperor simply responded that a ghost would suffice. Cold.

As it is, the Emperor was told that Angron would likely not see the the end of the crusade. At that point The Emperor probably decided "this is a sunk cost" and wrote Angron off. An so he did nothing to mitigate the effects, do nothing to change how much Angron hated him, and throw him into warzones after giving him a massive force and assumed that it would never come back to haunt him, after all Angron was going to be dead before the End of it, may as well get some use out of him. Could He have saved Angron? Perhaps, should he have the occasion to put his entire undivided attention to it. But with Him busy with the demands of the Imperium, powering the [[Astronomican]] and trying to get the Human Webway online the Emperor seemingly did not want to sink the extra time and resources into saving one of His Primarchs.