Editing Greater Good (section)

==The God of the Greater Good?==
Recent fluff from Phil Kelly's novels has revealed that a brand-new Warp God has been created from the perceptions and worship of the Greater Good, mostly thanks to the psychic races of the Empire. It's a five-fingered, many-armed god, taking on a vague resemblance to an Ethereal wearing a blank and impassive mask; it seems like a benevolent being but it hungers to spread its arms across the galaxy and reshape everything in its image. This appearance is reminiscent of ''Sahasrabhuja'' from Buddhism. This massive entity saved the Fourth Sphere and blasted a hole from the Warp into reality for them to escape.

The Fourth Sphere T'au are the only guys who know that entity exists (somehow) and it's gaining power the more the T'au Empire expands and assimilates other races, something their commanders are not happy with, seeing it as a corruption of the true Greater Good and a threat to their Empire. In an attempt to stop or kill the god of the Greater Good before it fully forms (even though that's already happened) they secretly engineered the genocide of the T'au allied races who survived the transition to real space, and are murdering every alien they can whenever they're given the opportunity (including Gue'vesa after they trick them into joining the Empire). Eventually Shadowsun and the Ethereal Council disciplined the Fourth Sphere commanders with a ritual punishment before they were returned to the ranks or sent back to the empire for re-assimilation. As of the Psychic Awakening lore, this didn't do jack shit to curb their bloodlust.

The big problem with this new lore, is it's complete horseshit for a number of reasons. The first is that the Tau have a muted warp presence and even if we were to include all of their allied races, they wouldn't even equal a fraction of what the Eldar currently have in the setting, and they had to perform a complex ritual that had the backing of an actual god behind it to form Ynnead, and even then Ynnead doesn't have nearly the power the god of the Greater Good has displayed. Even when the Eldar accidentally created Slaanesh, it took countless trillions of Eldar souls and millennia of hedonism to create it. The second reason is that the Tau don't worship the concept of the greater good; saying they do is like saying people worship the country they live in. The third is that the Tau have been around for a relatively short time which, combined with their relatively small population, has barely been noticed by anything in the Warp, let alone having the power to create a new god in it. It also kind of makes you wonder that if a bunch of humans "believing" in the Greater Good was enough to make it manifest in the Warp - and considering the population of humans in the Tau empire is relatively minuscule, not to mention the fact that the entire Tau population is outnumbered by an average human city on a hive world - then [[God-Emperor of Mankind|that lich on the golden chair]] should've gotten so powered up by the faith of several quadrillion humans that he would've glassed everything that could've posed a threat to the Imperium, both in the Materium and the Warp.

All in all, it's such a stupid idea that the editor should've put it down the second it came up (possibly after slapping the writer), being so hilariously awful people would've laughed it off as bad fanfiction had it not been on Black Library. Likely (and hopefully) it'll be ignored by everything around it, much like anything C.S. Goto writes down.

In fact it's such a stupid idea that the only way this whole story makes any sense at all is if this is a chaos god posing as the god of the greater good. Of the big four, Tzeentch seems like the one most likely to try and pull this kind of stunt off since the Tau are dynamic, seek to upset the galactic order and the greater good is an inherently hopeful philosophy, all things that fit into his portfolio. Combined with the tau being fairly gullible about this kind of thing, and it's not out of the question for him to try this. For what end, who knows? But Tzeentch is all about plans within plans, written on a mobius strip, hidden in a Klein bottle, so it could be for a goal that is a thousand years yet to develop. That said Phil Kelly is not nearly talented enough nor enmeshed enough with the lore to think that far ahead with his writings. Still it's the best explanation we got for what's really going on here.

Unfortunately, this tumor upon lore is only expanding. In Kelly's latest Shadowsun novel, this 'goddess' now has the power to fight against the Death Guard by protecting people from their plagues, becalming Death Guard ships in the warp, and even destroying them along with the minds of its crew (this could be used by the writer to further reinforce the Tau goddess being Tzeentch in disguise, for Nurgle is Tzeentch's arch enemy). This goddess is described as shaped like a human and tau, while possessing arms from many of the respective races in the Empire. They held weapons, tools of knowledge, and wisps of light. All that's required is the client races of the Tau Empire praying/believing it (or at least its effects) into existence. Black Library and Phil Kelly have chosen to double down on this fucktarded piece of lore, so stow any hopes of this shit going away or getting a satisfactory explanation.
 
[[Category: Warhammer 40,000]]
[[Category: Dawn of War]]
[[Category: Xenos]]
[[Category: Tau]]
[[Category: 40k and Fantasy Gods]]