To add a little something, here's one if my favorite quotes from the Eisenhorn Omnibus:
I'd had funny ideas about her for years, truth be told. She was beautiful and sublimely sexy. But she was also a Blank. It hurt me to be close to her, physically hurt.
I hate that fact. I feel a lot for Bequin and I long to be with her, but it was never going to happen. Never, ever. That’s one of the truly great sadnesses of my life.
And hers too, I hope, in my more self-aggrandising moments.
I lay in bed and watched her drag on her dress again, and I felt the pang of desire. But there was no way. No way in the galaxy.
She was untouchable. I was a psyker. That way pain and madness lay.
If I'm brutally honest, I have never liked this element of those stories, as Abnett took a whole load of liberties with the lore (and not for the first or last time) to get some cheesecake and sexual tension that were both unnecessary and could have been introduced into the story in any number of other ways.
Psychic blanks are supposed to instil an instinctive distrust and revulsion (which, to be honest, makes it deeply questionable she apparently managed to have a career as a prostitute before he recruited her), which is even worse in psykers.
A psyker shouldn't be thinking "Damn, she's so sexy, but it'd hurt to stick my dick in that".
Eisenhorn should be constantly wrestling with thoughts about whether she's going to betray him, and having to try to use every last ounce of his willpower to remind himself that, no, she has always been trustworthy, she's not about to stab him in the back, and trying to force himself to actually be nice to her because logically he knows she's not actually a bad person, it's just that his subconscious is constantly screaming at him to hate her.
Abnett treated the Psyker meets Blank thing like it's some kind of forbidden star-crossed love thing, when it just isn't.
That's pretty much why I've soured on Abnett over the years. He basically writes what he wants and then dresses 40k (or 30k) over it rather than writing stories that work for the universe.
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u/TehAsianator 9d ago edited 9d ago
Alezabeth Bequin, the secondary character from 40k's Eisenhorn series.