YMMV / The Roboutian Heresy

• Awesome Art: An artist named Nemris has done a lot great fanart for the fanfic.
• Author's Saving Throw: It is quite apparent that the level of detail and thought put into each Legion's index improves as the story goes on... which consequently also left the chapter dedicated to the Dark Angels' index somewhat bare, and Zahariel has openly admitted to this and expressed a desire to further develop things. One of the first additional lore blurbs in The End Times section of the fic goes into detail about the Lord of Lies, Azrael, finally giving the Dark Angels a champion among their ranks. And the first part of the terran crucible "the hunt for Cypher" is all about the history, past, and current state of the Dark Angels.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • While it may have started as twisted reflections of their loyalist selves, the presence of the Ruinstorm probably stopped the Ultramarines from degenerating into an equivalent of Canon 40k's Black legion: on one hand it gave the Ultramarines an entirely different haven all for themselves, allowing them to escape from the purge that almost drove the Sons of Horus to extinction in canon. Plus it also allowed them to keep Guilliman's body enshrined without the issues that faced the Sons of Horus in Maeleum, keeping the worship of their Primarch alive and well for ten thousand years.
  • Many of the RH loyalists are shown to be far more compassionate and in some cases accomplishing than many of the 40K loyalists were. This could be because the origin started as a Changer of Ways's vision give to an Ultramarine successor, as if to break his spirit by showing him that the Imperium that the Ultramarines helped to create was far worse than the alternative if the roles were swapped, and perhaps to show him that he and his lineage were inferior.
• Iron Woobie: The Death Guard. They're constantly away from the Imperium, waging war against the worst xenos species in the galaxy, and whenever they're required to wage war inside the Imperium's borders, it usually means that they need to kill billions of humans. And yet they still take it in stride, performing their duty with grim determination.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Corax's desolation of the Kiavahr Nexus. He killed entire planets to have his revenge on techno-lords and scientists who turned his early live into darkest torment. While the Tech-Lords do have their collective Fate Worse than Death coming, the rest of the planets who were similarly enslaved to the ruling despotic technocracy didn't deserve to be slaughtered. And neither were the prisoners indentured on the moon of Lycaeus deserved to be freed only to be used as unwilling test subjects for the Raven Guards' horrific genetic experiments.
  • Vulkan's order to kill one fifth of the population of a single city-state on the planet Kharataan to teach them not to oppose the Imperium in general and Vulkan in particular. And then he did it again and again with each city-state which dared to oppose him on the planet. When Conrad Kurze sent ten of his legioners with the message from Malcador to Vulkan to return back to Terra and explain his actions, he beat them to death with his warhammer without a hint of remorse.
  • Where other Primarchs has one, Arch-Traitor Roboute Guilliman has several which could qualify:
    • He engineered or influenced corruption White Scars, Blood Angels and the rest fall to Chaos. The Ruinstorm Breaks: Part One implies he's done the same to the Ethereal Caste, setting up the T'au Empire as unwitting pawns
    • He more or less already crossed it with the Istvaan Atrocity and the Drop Site Massacre, both of which he planned in this timeline, where he slaughtered first most of his own remaining loyalist gene-sons in the former, and then his own loyalist brothers and their legions in the latter with the aid of his fellow treacherous brothers.
    • Corrupting and sacrificing the entirety of the 500 Worlds of Ultramar - his own dominion - and all its inhabitants to the horrors of the Ruinstorm just to trap and hopefully destroy the Word Bearers and the World Eaters is one. If the previous two atrocities don't qualify him as crossing the line, this should do it.
    • And if that isn't enough, during his ten thousand years in agonizing stasis, he resolved to get the strength to escape his torment by manipulating his already degenerated sons into killing each other, devouring and burning their souls to fuel his recovery in a dick-move rivalling Cronus devouring his own children. Even the narration noted this atrocity, the murdering of one's offsprings, is abhorred since Humanity's earliest beginnings and rightly implying Guilliman had crossed a terrible moral threshold.
    • For Aeonid Thiel, him ignoring his spectral parents' pleas to turn back (even if he did consider it for a moment) and banishing them back into the Warp serves as his own indicator that Guilliman is Beyond Redemption, as this was quite literally the last opportunity he would ever had to do so.
  • After it is revealed Daemon Primarch Sanguinius is not as insane as he appeared and that he had been faking it in order to plan for the Angel War, it is also revealed that he killed his brother Horus' clones hundreds of times was not so they 'could be brothers again' as many had thought, but to wash away any remaining doubt and conscience within himself in a tide of fratricidal blood. He also don't give a damn about his Legion anymore where before he had originally damned himself for their salvation from their genetic flaws, not bothering to call them for his Angel War and not even batting an eye when his Sanguinary Guard captain Azkaellon was killed after he had spent literally aeons faithfully guarding Sanguinius in Undying Loyalty. Both revealed Sanguinius have been utterly corrupted by Slaanesh into such a completely solipsistic monster even Lorgar, who was willing to give his brother Daemon Primarch Lion El'Jonson a chance to be saved, knows full well that Sanguinius is truly Beyond Redemption, and does not hesitate to put him down permenantly when the chance was offered.
  • Primarch Rogal Dorn and his Imperial Fists arguably crossed the horizon by launching the very first Blood Crusade in the RH-verse, slaughtering uncounted billions of civilians across hundreds of worlds for no other reason than to seal their pact with Khorne.