I thought it might be interesting to open a discussion of Mike Ryder’s talk and see what thoughts it raised for everyone else. I have a number of observations and questions of my own, but I’d like to start with one point that stayed with me after the talk.
If I understood the argument correctly, it seems to rest on a human biographical model: life before war — war or military service — life after war.
This immediately raises a question for me about the distinction between war and military service, because I do not think they are quite the same thing. For a professional soldier — even a human one — the meaningful “before” and “after” may already be structured differently from those of a civilian who is called into war, or into a period of service that is expected to end within a foreseeable future.
Astartes seem to me much closer to a form of lifelong military identity, although of course in a much more radical sense than any human professional soldier. Their military function is built into the very form of their existence.
So I wonder what “after” is supposed to mean in both cases. And, in the case of the Astartes, how far is it legitimate to correlate “home” with civilian or peaceful life at all, if their lives unfold within a fundamentally different context?
If “home” for an Astartes can instead be a Legion, a Chapter, a brotherhood, perhaps even a particular group of brothers, then do they really lack a meaningful “before” and “after”? Or do these categories simply take a different form?
This is where I am not entirely sure I understand the role of the human model in the argument. If it is meant to show that Astartes fall outside the human category, then that makes sense to me. But what does it then tell us about their own experience?
Is there not a tension between saying that Astartes do not fit a specifically human model of “before - war - after (home)” and then treating that failure to fit the model as evidence that they themselves lack a meaningful “before,” “after,” or “home” at all?
I’d be very interested to hear how others read this part of the argument
Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
Irina Keranza,
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
Re: Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
I think you’re right that there’s a tension here. The before/war/after (home) model comes out of a particular culture of war: the citizen-conscript of the twentieth century, for whom civilian life is normal, war is an interruption, and going home is the expected end (Mike's model from literature). Where military life is the normal adult condition and the civic is martial, as in the idealised/ficitonalised Spartan model or the Janissaries raised from boyhood within their corps, the shape is different: the corps itself becomes 'home'.
That suggests maybe the Astartes don’t lack a home at all - your different form. They have one to return to, in the Chapter or Legion and in particular groups of brothers. Their estrangement woudl come if they are cut off from it. That connects with some of the twentieth-century literature in an interesting way. The wounded or broken soldier is often estranged twice: from civilian life, and also from the comrades who had become his real home. Sassoon’s need to go back to his men in Pat Barker’s Regeneration is a good example (Philoctetes, abandoned by his comrades because of his wound, is an ancient version of the same thing).
For the Astartes, that second kind of estrangement might be the only one that really matters, but I don't know the books well enough to know where that arises. Interestingly, in the Age of Sigmar novels, there is a dominant Stormcast (who are very Astartes derived) trope of trying to remember who they were before Apotheosis, yet with each death they become more and more bound to their martial identity as the chosen of Sigmar and less able to remember themselves.
That suggests maybe the Astartes don’t lack a home at all - your different form. They have one to return to, in the Chapter or Legion and in particular groups of brothers. Their estrangement woudl come if they are cut off from it. That connects with some of the twentieth-century literature in an interesting way. The wounded or broken soldier is often estranged twice: from civilian life, and also from the comrades who had become his real home. Sassoon’s need to go back to his men in Pat Barker’s Regeneration is a good example (Philoctetes, abandoned by his comrades because of his wound, is an ancient version of the same thing).
For the Astartes, that second kind of estrangement might be the only one that really matters, but I don't know the books well enough to know where that arises. Interestingly, in the Age of Sigmar novels, there is a dominant Stormcast (who are very Astartes derived) trope of trying to remember who they were before Apotheosis, yet with each death they become more and more bound to their martial identity as the chosen of Sigmar and less able to remember themselves.
Re: Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
Oh, Gavin, thank you for replying! I was already beginning to think I wasn’t going to get to discuss this with anyone 
It’s so quiet here! 
My thinking was moving in roughly the same direction: it seems to me that Astartes are closer either to older forms of military identity, or to professional soldiers — specifically those serving in combat units.
I really liked your idea of *estrangement* rather than “returning home” itself, and especially the idea of a double estrangement. I think it shifts the perspective quite a lot.
It seems to me that with Astartes these two forms of estrangement are not reproduced literally, but are somehow rearranged. For a human soldier, the first may be estrangement from peaceful civilian life. For an Astartes, what seems to occupy the place of that “home” is the brotherhood — the Legion, company, Chapter, and so on. So belonging becomes the functional equivalent of home.
Then perhaps the first kind of estrangement can be seen particularly clearly in Malcador’s Knights-Errant who came from Legions that had betrayed the Emperor.
The second kind — estrangement from one’s fellow soldiers after being wounded or “broken” — seems more complicated. Here I find myself thinking of the Dreadnoughts. They do not necessarily cease to belong to the brotherhood, but their way of existing within it changes radically and becomes very discontinuous. And, to my mind, the most extreme case is Rylanor in *The Ancient Awaits*, because in him these forms of estrangement become layered one upon another.
It’s so quiet here! 
My thinking was moving in roughly the same direction: it seems to me that Astartes are closer either to older forms of military identity, or to professional soldiers — specifically those serving in combat units.
I really liked your idea of *estrangement* rather than “returning home” itself, and especially the idea of a double estrangement. I think it shifts the perspective quite a lot.
It seems to me that with Astartes these two forms of estrangement are not reproduced literally, but are somehow rearranged. For a human soldier, the first may be estrangement from peaceful civilian life. For an Astartes, what seems to occupy the place of that “home” is the brotherhood — the Legion, company, Chapter, and so on. So belonging becomes the functional equivalent of home.
Then perhaps the first kind of estrangement can be seen particularly clearly in Malcador’s Knights-Errant who came from Legions that had betrayed the Emperor.
The second kind — estrangement from one’s fellow soldiers after being wounded or “broken” — seems more complicated. Here I find myself thinking of the Dreadnoughts. They do not necessarily cease to belong to the brotherhood, but their way of existing within it changes radically and becomes very discontinuous. And, to my mind, the most extreme case is Rylanor in *The Ancient Awaits*, because in him these forms of estrangement become layered one upon another.
Irina Keranza,
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
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gwhitcombe68
- Posts: 3
- Joined: 17 Oct 2026, 01:05
Re: Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
Right Keranza, how exactly does Rylanor's double estrangement play out in the book, mate? CheersKeranza wrote:For an Astartes, what seems to occupy the place of that “home” is the brotherhood — the Legion, company, Chapter, and so on.
Re: Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
Yes, I can try. This is roughly how I understand this “double estrangement”.
If we take our starting idea that, for Astartes, the functional equivalent of home is above all belonging to a brotherhood — I’ll speak about the Legion, because I know the Legion era better, though I think this may apply to Chapters to some extent as well — then “never going home” for an Astartes may mean not the impossibility of returning to civilian life, but the impossibility, for whatever reason, of fully experiencing oneself as part of the Legion and living a full legionary life.
In Rylanor’s case, the first layer is already connected with the fact that he is a Dreadnought. Essentially, he is not simply badly wounded but almost killed, and his existence becomes very discontinuous: stasis, awakenings, participation in battles, but absence from the everyday life of his brothers. He remains part of the Legion, and an honoured part of it — a keeper of its memory — but his way of being within that brotherhood changes radically.
Then comes a second, much deeper rupture. The Emperor’s Children betray the Emperor and, with that, the image of the Legion to which Rylanor himself remains loyal. On Isstvan III he becomes literally isolated from his former “home” and spends centuries there alone. So now the estrangement is no longer connected only with his existence as a Dreadnought.
Then, I think, it is very interesting that Fulgrim effectively offers him a chance to “go home” — to rejoin the Emperor’s Children.
But Rylanor refuses.
So the problem is no longer the impossibility of returning as such, but the fact that home itself has ceased to be the home he recognises as his own.
To my mind this suggests a very interesting comparison with my favourite Loken and Abaddon — with how differently this “return” plays out in their case. Because with Loken the bond with his old brotherhood seems never to disappear completely, even after everything that has happened: at the end he is still in a relationship with Abaddon, still trying to talk to him.
So for Rylanor, home survives almost entirely as an inner ideal and a memory of what the Legion once was, or should have been. For Loken, some part of the old home still seems to exist in a living other — in Abaddon, in what remains of the old fraternal bond.
That is what I meant by two forms of estrangement becoming layered in Rylanor: first, the very way in which he belongs to the brotherhood changes, and then the brotherhood itself disappears as a home that is actually available to him.
I don’t know how convincing this is as a case of *double estrangement*. What do you think?
If we take our starting idea that, for Astartes, the functional equivalent of home is above all belonging to a brotherhood — I’ll speak about the Legion, because I know the Legion era better, though I think this may apply to Chapters to some extent as well — then “never going home” for an Astartes may mean not the impossibility of returning to civilian life, but the impossibility, for whatever reason, of fully experiencing oneself as part of the Legion and living a full legionary life.
In Rylanor’s case, the first layer is already connected with the fact that he is a Dreadnought. Essentially, he is not simply badly wounded but almost killed, and his existence becomes very discontinuous: stasis, awakenings, participation in battles, but absence from the everyday life of his brothers. He remains part of the Legion, and an honoured part of it — a keeper of its memory — but his way of being within that brotherhood changes radically.
Then comes a second, much deeper rupture. The Emperor’s Children betray the Emperor and, with that, the image of the Legion to which Rylanor himself remains loyal. On Isstvan III he becomes literally isolated from his former “home” and spends centuries there alone. So now the estrangement is no longer connected only with his existence as a Dreadnought.
Then, I think, it is very interesting that Fulgrim effectively offers him a chance to “go home” — to rejoin the Emperor’s Children.
But Rylanor refuses.
So the problem is no longer the impossibility of returning as such, but the fact that home itself has ceased to be the home he recognises as his own.
To my mind this suggests a very interesting comparison with my favourite Loken and Abaddon — with how differently this “return” plays out in their case. Because with Loken the bond with his old brotherhood seems never to disappear completely, even after everything that has happened: at the end he is still in a relationship with Abaddon, still trying to talk to him.
So for Rylanor, home survives almost entirely as an inner ideal and a memory of what the Legion once was, or should have been. For Loken, some part of the old home still seems to exist in a living other — in Abaddon, in what remains of the old fraternal bond.
That is what I meant by two forms of estrangement becoming layered in Rylanor: first, the very way in which he belongs to the brotherhood changes, and then the brotherhood itself disappears as a home that is actually available to him.
I don’t know how convincing this is as a case of *double estrangement*. What do you think?
Irina Keranza,
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
Re: Never Going Home: Humans vs Astartes
I liked how Mike grounded his discussion in a bunch of other sci fi narratives. At the conference Thea and I chatted about Robocop as a model of the “never going home” trope, and I think that aligns with some of this thread. Duty and service embodied in a changed form, but a tragic role for either narrator or viewer in knowing that there really isn’t a going back.