Games Workshop showed us The Emperor's current state for the first time in 38 years and it's hard to overstate how monumental that is

If you've never clocked it before, The Emperor is rather important in Warhammer 40k. Even those who don't really know the setting are adjacently aware of the fact that Warhammer people love to shout "For The Emperor!" at every available opportunity. Not only is he the figurehead of mankind, whose psychic presence is so significant that starships use him as a lighthouse, but he's really the inciting figure for the state of 40k's universe.

He's also enthroned on an ancient and nightmarish life support device called The Golden Throne, which has to consume 1,000s of psykers (psychics) everyday just to keep itself running. John Blanche, the artist responsible for much of Warhammer 40k's iconic visual tone, and who sadly passed away recently, originally produced "The Emperor Sits Upon His Golden Throne" back in 1987.

John Blanche himself recently said that the famous illustration is actually not of The Emperor, though:

"It was never meant to be the real Emperor. All these people queue up for generations, all these pilgrims, and they finally get to meet The Emperor at the top of the golden stairs, and he's not real. The real Emperor is a corpse in a big glass jar, kept in machines in the background."

Whether you think Blanche's art shows The Emperor or not, he's a rarely depicted figure in Warhammer 40k despite his importance. In fact, the only other time I remember seeing him was on the cover of the first volume of The End and the Death, the final novel in the Horus Heresy series, though this artwork shows him sitting on The Golden Throne at quite a distance, and is obviously not an image of The Emperor's current state circa the 41st millenium.

Well, in the most recent trailer for 40k's new edition (launching June 20), Games Workshop finally showed off The Emperor inside The Golden Throne, and yeah, he ain't looking too hot—although I suppose he's not too shabby for someone who's been on occult dialysis for 10,000 years. This is definitely the darkest trailer I've ever seen for 40k—it doesn't even try to deny the fact that The Emperor is a corpse god, calling him "The Carrion Lord of the Imperium", a title usually reserved for those slandering him.

But this is also the first time since John Blanche's artwork in 1987 (or I guess technically ever, considering he says that's not him) that we've seen The Emperor's current state in Warhammer 40k. The trailer does feature a few different versions of him on the throne, but either way, he doesn't look in peak form.

So what's all the fuss about? I'm about to get a little spoilery here, so if you plan to read the Horus Heresy, maybe stop. As mentioned, The Emperor is arguably the inciting figure in Warhammer 40k, an immortal man born in ancient Anatolia who shepherded humanity's ascension and expansion across the stars, but whose hubris ultimately led to the collapse of enlightenment and the never-ending dark ages of 40k.

It's hard not to consider Warhammer 40k as a very personal nightmare for The Emperor, a man who vehemently denied his divinity and touted the "Imperial Truth", that there are no gods, but is now trapped in a life support device and worshipped by the species he sought to free from the shackles of faith.

And there's nothing he can do about it, because if he were to step from the Golden Throne (not that he can), it would unleash a tide of daemons he's holding at bay due to his failed ambitions, onto terra, the throne world, and the astronomicon (the lighthouse used to navigate the warp), would go out, leaving humanity separated, stranded, and easy to pick off, as it was in Old Night.

He never wanted humanity to rely on warp travel long-term (a form of FTL that requires humans to pass through the daemon realm of the Chaos gods), but because of certain happenings, all he can really do now is keep the lights on—it's fundamentally plan B.

If you want to know more about The Emperor, I recommend reading The Master of Mankind, though A Thousand Sons is the earlier novel that explains the extremely tragic incident that fundamentally begins the collapse of mankind and big E's ambitions.

Best Warhammer games: Fantasy epics
Best Warhammer 40K games: The complete ranking
Best Warhammer TTRPGs: Across all three settings
Best Warhammer 40K books: Grimdark novels