Everyone who’s interested in 40K lore knows that the Emperor of Mankind gene-crafted 20 “sons” to be his superhuman generals in the Great Crusade to reunite humanity. Equally well known is that two of these Primarchs – the second and the eleventh – were “lost”: everything about them was intentionally deleted from Imperial records. But what happened that led to their becoming ‘the forgotten and the purged’?
While theory-crafters are more than happy to offer in-universe explanations, the real answer is that 40k lore is simply incomplete with regards to the fate of the Lost Primarchs – the fiction doesn’t settle the matter one way or the other.
That a fiction is incomplete with regards to some matters is unsurprising; nearly all fictions leave some things open (see e.g. Ryan 2001; Wildman & Folde 2017; Wildman 2019; Gualeni 2021). Typically, these gaps are trivial, so aren’t given any further thought by appreciators (e.g., 40k lore is incomplete with regards to whether Rogal Dorn has a mole on his right shoulder). But the kind of incompleteness that concerns the fate of the Lost Primarchs in 40k lore is, I contend, a novel, invitational incompleteness, where the ‘gap’ is left open to entice the reader to fill it in with their own explanations, creations, and (supplemental) stories.
The aim of this talk is to present and develop this notion of invitational incompleteness. To do so, after first spelling out the general idea of fictional incompleteness and delineating some forms it might take, I leverage the Lost Primarchs to sketch the concept of invitational incompleteness. I then show how invitational incompleteness is intimately tied up with the interactive, serial, and multi-medium nature of 40K. Finally, I conclude by comparing invitational incompleteness with earlier work on (forced) choices in game settings (Wildman & Woodward 2018).
Author bio
Nathan Wildman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. His research focuses on digital aesthetics, including interactivity, glitch art, videogames and AR/VR. He has published on virtual theft, online affective manipulation, and moral education via gameplay. He is currently finalizing a monograph on watching people play video games.
