Editing Perturabo (section)

==Personality==
{{topquote|I am not a man, I am far more.|Perturabo}}
{{topquote|In those words is the poison that spoils your potential..., Let me tell you, my brother, you who affects to despise love so much yet must certainly crave it over all other things, you are the biggest fool I have ever met.|Calliphone, Perturabo's sister, before he killed her}}

The adage goes that the Primarchs are each a distilled fragment of the Emperor's own personality and each one could be boiled down to a single word. The word to describe Perturabo is spite. As in "if you even so much as connect your gaze to mine in a passing glance, I will press your face into a belt sander running at 10,000 RPM until my own hand disappears into the fog of blood and bone dust."

However, of all the Primarchs Pert is the most wildly inconsistent, with depictions of him varying between Black Library authors. His motives, values and behaviors change between books, constantly contradicting any attempt at a general encapsulation of character. The only consistent trait is a mercurial disposition and ever-ruling sense of resentment. As a result, he has been stuck with the moniker of being a raging autist, to the chagrin of Iron Warriors fans everywhere. Pert's defining character trait is more reflected in his own sons than himself, with such lovely examples including [[Honsou]], who is only ''half'' an Iron Warrior. Pert's emotional inconsistencies could easily be argued from a narrative position as a form of bipolar disorder, which would itself explain his spiteful attitude. Observe:

In "Crimson Fist", Perturabo was portrayed as a Saturday-morning villain who flips his shit when a flunky brings him bad news. His emotions range from [[Stupid Evil|"hand-wringing evil"]] to [[BBEG|"I'll get you next time"]]. Thanks, John French.

In the third Forge World Horus Heresy book "Extermination", Perturabo is a cold, resentful bastard who the moment he was reunited with his Legion had it decimated for not being the best, then wondered how his legion still wasn't as good as the Dark Angels, Ultramarines and Luna Wolves, [[Fail|and why no one liked him.]] As an aside the FW books are co-written by John French. The Forge World Imperial Armour Volume 13 Book also mentions a civil war between the Iron Warriors in M34 that, in-universe, is suspected to have been instigated by the Daemon Primarch Perturabo to weed out the weak amongst his scions. Some pieces of lore however, like the pre-Primarch IVth's Siege of [[Forge World|Incaladion]], hint at an underlying genetic quirk.

Guy Haley's novel "Hammer of Olympia" portrays Perturabo as an idealistic but staggeringly narcissistic renaissance man, seeing himself alone worthy of bettering humanity and the courts of Olympia holding him back. Brooding and resentful, he is inward-looking and self-serving, even if he has convinced himself otherwise. He does a total 180 in the last 25-something pages of the book after smashing Olympia without hesitation.

[[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 but refuses to consider himself a "traitor" as opposed to the Emperor's "Loyalists". He came to the conclusion of joining Horus' side logically but hates himself for it and resents the circumstances that "forced" him to make the decision. Pride, endurance and commitment to excellence are both the strengths that make his legion and the vices that guaranteed his damnation.

McNeill's Perturabo is shown to possess loads of teeth-grinding, under-the-surface, passive-aggressive, subtle rage, particularly where he buys hundreds of house-sized paintings of his own men and has them all burned. 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|Imperial Fists flag]] waving over the fortress. This just shows that Perturabo possesses an all-consuming hatred for Dorn; in every waking moment he lives, breathes, and shits the thought that Dorn is somehow better than him. When put into context of his upbringing where he ''knew'' he was better than everyone else but had to constantly face the questions and doubts of lesser men while being unable to fulfill his potential, you can appreciate Perturabo's seething frustration being stuck on the fringes of the Great Crusade getting all of the shit jobs, while other brothers like [[Horus]] and Dorn get all the good jobs and hence the glory... until you remember that nobody forced or ordered him to do so, they simply ''asked'' him to because he was so skilled at it and he accepted in the hopes that being a doormat would get his Legion some glory and people to like him. Interestingly enough, this might be a genetic flaw rather than pure personality, as hinted by the Forge World black books. Also, according to some sources, [[Emperor|Big-E]] viewed Primarchs as tools to be used instead of normal human beings with free will, feelings and passions, so we can add Emperor's general retardation to the reasons of his fall as well.

As an extension of this, he's prone to premeditated acts of calculated destruction and cruelty to get one over on his brothers. One example: when Fulgrim fucked around one too many times on campaign, Pert invited Fulgrim into his inner sanctum to show him a clockwork [[Warhound Scout Titan]] only to smash Fulgrim's pretty face into the guts of the machine; 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 was a masterpiece in itself and Perturabo was willing to break his brother's face on it to make a point. A second example during the Great Crusade in the McNeill's novel "Magnus the Red" where he spends what must have been a long time painstakingly crafting a psychic sextant device at Magnus' request, only to smash it in front of Magnus because he knew exactly what it was for; for this Magnus outright called him cruel but Perturabo's response was that he needed to illustrate the Emperor's warning against delving too deep into the warp and simply ''saying'' as much wouldn't have done any good, [[Konrad Curze|so being cruel was the quickest option]] (surprisingly showing a great deal of loyalty and obedience to the Emperor in the process despite his attitude). Also, as Monarchia showed, the Emperor's methods were pretty similar to Perturabo's when it came to teaching people a lesson. Unsurprisingly, the results and peoples' reactions to their methods were similar as well.

Perturabo seems to [[Mortarion|look down on Chaos]] in general, rejecting the opportunity to become a daemon prince of Nurgle by slaying the Lunar Wolves turned Plague Marines who offered it to him. Then he mocked Daemon Prince Angron for ''somehow'' becoming weaker than he was as a mortal Primarch, even causing Angron to literally ''shrink'' as he continued shittalking him to his face, noting that Angron's strength didn't belong to him and was only as good as the wanton slaughter he wrought on a given planet and concluding with "You think I would let your kind wield your weapons against me? I have taken their measure" just before spamming a torrent of ammo in Angron's face followed by curbstomping him with [[Ferrus Manus|Forge Breaker]]. Funny how he became a Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided. Perhaps, given that Fulgrim literally stole part of his life force to become a Daemon Prince himself, the remainder of which was only getting weaker as noted upon by the aforementioned Nurgle Wolves, Pert's hand was forced under the caveat that he could retain some independence if he were dedicated to the Ruinous Powers as a whole rather than as an avatar of a single Chaos deity. If [[Malal]] were still a thing (it is), Perturabo would've probably been slated to become his Daemon Prince instead, right after [[Konrad Curze]] and the 11th Primarch.

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; again in "Magnus the Red" by McNeill, his actions on the planet Morningstar would dispassionately leave millions of refugees to die simply because he could not afford to save them all-- all because they fell on the wrong side of his equation. He had even argued with his brother Magnus about the realities of war and the need to avoid sentimentality in decision-making. He would later admit to one of his commanders (Barban Falk, THE WARSMITH) that he is deeply affected by his emotions and was itching to find those responsible for his choices and punish them, later becoming exceptionally angry when he discovered that the planetary elite were responsible for the catastrophe; he labelled their treachery against the Emperor as utterly unforgivable (no doubt foreshadowing his own personal opinion about joining the Horus Heresy). He also admitted that he could not be ''seen'' to be emotional because he had a reputation to consider.

Perturabo was detached from his own men. He had his '''Trident''': a cadre of officers similar to Horus' own '''Mournival''', though he didn't like any of them and considered replacing them, which raises the question of why he even had them. You think the Lion had people problems? At least his men could appreciate his elegant brilliance along with his ruthlessness so that any losses were weighed against gains. Perturabo was a brute force machine: victory was a positive in his arithmetic of war, failure was negative, therefore to him, any cost was worth the price of winning. He illustrated this when he decimated his legion in the beginning days. His men took the lesson to heart but became hardened because of it. Officers felt disdain for the lives of their own men and scheming became rife within his legion, all scrambling for supremacy and the attentions of their masters to prove themselves worth keeping. Where other leaders might rule through [[Horus|force of personality]] or [[Konrad Curze|fear of reprisal]], Perturabo led through indifference, expecting the dream of the Imperium to speak for itself.

Even though he treats his men like tools at best and dogshit at less-than-best, he gets offended when the other legions show disrespect to their sacrifices, most notably Dorn's mocking "Perturabo throws men at walls" speech. He would say as much to his own sister before gutting her on the sole principle he was back to Olympia to genocide the planet for defying his orders to supply more men to be pushed through his meat grinder: "The Emperor uses me for the most thankless tasks, my men are thrown against the worst of horrors, given the most grueling roles, we are divided, our talents ignored, our might reduced to splitting rock, my Father ignores me, my men go unsung, our triumphs are unremembered, my brothers mock me as my men bleed, nobody cares." It wasn't until he killed Calliphone that he stopped to reflect on his own barbarism and started muttering to himself "The Emperor will never forgive us this, The Emperor cannot forgive us, ever." in his first ever sensation of shame. Once his men found him, they reported that other companies had gone AWOL and refused to kill anybody, to which he responded simply "Good."

Calliphone would herself note in her final moments that Perturabo's course of actions are significantly uncharacteristic (''pffft'') of the man she once knew: the artisan, the architect, the artist. And it's not until after the trauma of strangling his own sister to death does he have a sobering moment of clarity on what exactly he's become. It should be reiterated that Perturabo is the only person to have ever seen the Eye of Terror during his adolescence on Olympia, perhaps foreshadowing that his mind, brilliant though it may be, had been corrupted from the start by the Ruinous Powers. That much is not only plausible, probable even, but would explain just about everything from his spiteful, petty cruelty; irrational wanton slaughter of his own soldiers; his actions on the battlefield flowing contrary to his known strategic prowess; to his unpredictable mood swings and his constantly-changing personality. With the Ruinous Powers at the steering wheel of his mind, it would be little wonder why Perturabo was so self-destructive from start to finish, and wholly ironic when considering his remarks to Daemon Prince Angron.

Perturabo buried his dreams and his heart on Olympia's ridges, and then willingly cut all emotional ties and dove into Hell, all because he truly believed in his father's utopian dream of Imperium. He would do anything his father asked of him in order to achieve it. He murdered trillions, 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 post-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 buried that shit. To admit the hurt and the fatigue would be to admit he was human, something imperfect; to acknowledge the dropping morale of his men would be to admit that they were weak when they should be strong. So he did the only thing his sensibilities would allow him to do: he moved forward. He got the job done, and the next, and the next and the one after that. He kept doing what his father asked from him, because that's what "Perturabo" would do, the Primarch who shouldered burdens without complaint, who did the jobs no one else wanted.

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.

===Capabilities===

{{Topquote |Hold on, is architecture also art? Of course not, it's autism. Box-drawing. Masturbation with a ruler and a sextant or whatever they use. You should demean and criticize the genteel institution of architecture. While extolling the virtues of the *pure* arts.| Disco Elysium}}

As mentioned earlier, Perturabo was born with the innate knowledge of pretty much all practical and metaphysical sciences, which pretty much sets him apart from all of his brothers in that he had no "real" childhood, no trial and error period of learning. On ''his first day'' he was debating (and dismissing) the nature of religion with his planet's wise men, and was master-crafting swords better than most smiths. You'd reckon being born knowing everything would stunt your emotional growth. Yes, other Primarchs like Angron, the Lion or Kurze got a pretty raw start but for better or worse they learned to adapt and rise to greatness (or infamy). Perturabo started off already being as good as he was going to get; though it would take time for his body to grow strong, his mind was already at its peak, and he had to spend decades on a shitty little backwater planet with no appreciable resources with which to build an empire the same way that [[Roboute Guilliman|Guilliman]] or [[Rogal Dorn|Dorn]] did, all the while having to slap down naysayers telling him that his fantasies of advanced engineering and space travel were impossible.

As to his mind, if a comparison could be made, then he was probably just as intelligent as Guilliman, if not more so due to the seeming wide range of his capabilities. (Guilliman was renowned neither as philosopher, smith or artisan). As a military strategist Perturabo could plan a campaign from start to finish in his mind using the arithmetic of war; where Guilliman could orchestrate a flawless battle plan from the command center, [[Video_Games|Perturabo would enact it himself by plugging straight into the data feeds and absorbing all the info at once, circumventing the chain of command and issuing orders directly to squads, taking direct control of gun turrets and mechanised units and plotting their firing trajectories, even taking over starship systems and running them himself.]] 

Thus lies the problem: Perturabo is a general as much as [[Neckbeard|any player of Warhammer 40,000 is a "general"]]: he [[Stat block|sees the battlefield in terms of units with stat blocks]]; every soldier can be [[Warhammer 40,000|reduced to a number based on his armament or capability]] which would [[Powergamer|factor in to his arithmetic of war]]. Even Guilliman recognised the [[Dice | random nature]] of war and how small moments of heroism could change the flow of battle; other generals could trust their men to follow their orders to the best of their abilities and even exceed them from time to time and pull off something spectacular. On the other hand, in sincerely believing in his own superiority Perturabo would micromanage everything and instead remove the agency of his officers and men. His soldiers would never get their chance to succeed or fail on their own terms and were essentially reduced to minis on a tabletop. Which in turn would make his men paranoid, wondering if they would be thrown away into the grinder or be blamed for failure when they couldn't match Perturabo's expectations.

Additionally, one could make the argument that while he had a vast store of knowledge he knew how to use, Perturabo's other major flaw as a tactician was that he was unimaginative in anything other than his areas of expertise. Godlike with an artisan's inspiration when it came to matters of logistics, technology, siegecraft, and artillery, but too much of a stubborn and entitled martyr-manchild to [[Reasonable Marines|use different tactics as a situation demanded]], even when he was underestimated; it would seem that he refused to adapt because he was completely convinced of the logical superiority of his own methods, and to change them would be to suggest they were incorrect or inferior. This stubbornness might even be engineered into his particular gene-seed, as the sloppy victories his Legion achieved in the decades leading up to his rediscovery were on the whole spoiled by their refusal to change gears and try something different.

To be fair, he certainly wasn't the [[Leman Russ|only]] [[Konrad Curze|Primarch]] who was a [[Jaghatai Khan|one-trick-pony]], and many of those specialties were likely engineered into them by the Emperor, but his attitude certainly didn't help matters, whether he was calling Corax a coward for suggesting a feint, or dismissing ([[BLAM|or worse]]) his men for suggesting that a war of attrition might not be the best play. He may know how to crack an orbital defence that stymied three separate Legions, and how to dispassionately, surgically exploit killboxes to tear apart his opponents, but his tendency to dig in and throw men and big guns at the problem without paying heed to the input and suggestions of others made him ill-suited for [[White Scars|mobile]] and [[Raven Guard|asymmetrical]] warfare unless he had already engineered a means to keep them in place. There's even a scene in 'Path of Heaven' when Horus (swole from Chaos gains but still decidedly in his right mind as Warmaster) opines to Mortarion that Perturabo would be a poor choice to send after the Khan, believing that the Scars would run rings around his fortresses and artillery emplacements.

With this said, he wasn't '''entirely''' inflexible, and in fact prized creative thinking when [[Cannon|traditional]] methods failed him. He notes to [[Abaddon]] how [[Dorn]] taught him to take breaks during his planning sessions and seek clarity of thought, saying ''"only a fool would ignore the advice of a brilliant man"''. He also made a point of instructing his Legion on their fellows' methods of warfare when on campaign together. And, of course, the Dodekatheon (his great hall of tabletop wargames, complete with holographic terrain!) was entirely devoted to inspiring the innovation of strategy and tactics, both among his sons and himself. If his one-sided dismantling of the World Eaters on Deluge showed anything, it was that he could prepare for even the deadliest threats given time and information.

So ultimately, he was an ultra-competent specialist you could count on to perform his functions, an unmatched purveyor of solutions to fixed defenses, traps or emplacements that would break anyone else. However, his efficiency fell massively if dropped into a situation he hadn't previously prepared for, and whilst he would get the job done (he always did) it could be at terrible cost to his soldiers, his allies, and ultimately himself. No finer example of this exists than the Siege of Terra; he kept the traitors organised and the guns firing on nearly every level, but was ultimately uninterested in Horus' goals- if he hadn't given his word prior to the Heresy, he'd have been about as much as a team player as [[Angron]].

As an unwelcome revelation to the Mechanicum, Perturabo was quite capable of understanding binary machine code even when blurted out in its lightning fast audible form (something that would otherwise not be possible without some form of implants) to the point that tech priests unfamiliar with Perturabo would not actually believe it and be in for a shock when they attempted to use it in his presence (yet another example of Perturabo being underestimated).

Of all the Primarchs, Perturabo is the most misused of all. He was the only person in the Imperium of Man with his [[Jokaero|savant-esque technical expertise]]; he can read and write binary fluently by heart, he's a master mathematician and engineer, he programmed a new AI from scratch for a Warhound Scout Titan that he hand-built from the ground up, all things that the Mechanicum and greater Imperium are in dire need of constantly. Nobody, not [[Magnus]] nor [[Ferrus Manus]] or [[Belisarius Cawl]] could compare with his technical mastery, which remains unparalleled to the current millennium. Instead of assigning this literal Primarch-savant to research and development so nobody would have to waste time and energy kissing a machine spirit's ass for hours on end just to do ''something'', the Emperor saw fit to just throw Pert at walls.

All things considered, the only siege battle Perturabo should have ever fought would be a campaign on the bowels of Mars to purge it of all Archeotech bullshit like the Men of Iron, then emerge as a genuine hero and receive the accolades and recognition he would rightly deserve. Then put him to task on unfucking Mars' broken-ass atmosphere so the planet can flourish again, followed by putting him to task on creating STCs for brand new weaponry and AI to completely overwrite all the shitty machine spirits that have no place in holding the Imperium back from [[AWESOME|full-throttle badassery]]. Would it piss the Mechanicum off? Probably, but what right would they ''really'' have to complain about innovation after the Omnissiah's son just fixed two of their planet's worst problems? If anything, it would endear the populace of Mars to the Emperor more than ever and give Perturabo a purpose bigger than walking an army into a meat grinder over and over. [[grimderp|But you can't have a grimdark story without enormous potential being wasted fucking everywhere, now can you?]] [[Horus Heresy|To make an omelette, you gotta break eggs.]]

Unknown to anyone else, Perturabo had always possessed a strange connection to the Eye of Terror-- for some reason, he could sense it from anywhere in the galaxy, and he became convinced that it was constantly watching and judging his every action. The resulting inferiority (superiority) complex wasn't really helped by the fact that when he tried ask others if they could see the Eye, they assumed he was hallucinating. ''(Ironically, he was actually the one to give the Eye its current name-- before then, it was called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1 Cygnus X-1].)'' Considering he become one of those chosen by Chaos, he may have been right in feeling off at the Eye of Terror.

===Outside the box===
Oh, Perturabo enjoyed playing [[Warhammer 40000]], and no, we're not kidding; his legion's warrior lodge had a whole bunch of tables set up where they could all play scenarios against each other and see whose tactics and armies would win, proving that the [[Iron Warriors]] are [[Neckbeards]] (which would go a long way towards explaining why the IV Legion was so embittered). Perturabo himself owned an awesome perpetual-motion powered clockwork [[Warhound Scout Titan]] ''(I'd buy <s>one!</s> <s>three!!</s> ALL OF THEM!!!!!)'' which he facepalmed [[Fulgrim]] with (at the cost of the model) just to prove a point. [[Derp|What if he had a model of himself, then played with the model, but the model was made 30,000 years before him? Is there a GeeDubbs in 40k?]] [[what|Are we living in a board game to be made in the future?]] [[Derp|Would the]] [[Just as planned|events of 40k go as they where lorewise? Is Geedubbs Tzeentch? Is everyone under control of Tzeentch?]]

If you want to know, "Perturabo" is the name the nice lil' Perty chose for himself after reading some ancient texts predating the Age of Strife (or climbing out of his pod, depending on the story). Given GW's freaky love for kitchen pseudo Latin, we can assume it to be a deformation of the verb ''per'''d'''urabo'', meaning "I shall endure". Best predictive name ever if you consider the mountain of shit his bros and the Emprah threw on him before the Heresy... Or it could be a deformation of the verb '''perturbō''' meaning "I confuse, disturb, perturb, trouble, alarm". Or maybe both, making it a surprisingly good pun by GW standards. It's maybe also of note, that 'perdurabo' is the cult-name Aleister Crowley got when he entered the Golden Dawn-- no mere coincidence, I would assume!

Also noted that his name sounds fairly close to the Spanish word perturBaDo which is just 2 letters away and means "being disturbed", and applies amazingly well when you consider that this guy lived in permanent paranoia and was forced to watch the eye of terror almost from birth.

Or maybe said "Ancient texts" were some 40K material meaning he [[what|named himself after himself]].