I've been reading myself up on Warhammer Lore, and Holy F#%$, there is some serious messed up s#€£ there. No, scratch that. Almost everything is messed up.
Is it just me, or are there some serious Aryan race vibes going on in the Blood Angels?
The wiki explains how new Blood Angels are initiated now, using the blood drawn from the Sanguinary Priests, who in turn have consumed small amounts of Sanguinius' blood. But how was it performed before he died? Did he personally donate his blood for all the recruits? That doesn't match up with the lore that the Blood Angels; the blood angel gene-seed had a low rate of failure, leading the Blood Angels to create massive numbers of new recruits, most of which died in the challenges they faced.
I'm tempted to go with my alternate concept, a White Scars librarian/apothecary, but then I read up on ritual scarification and ... ugh. I guess every single bit of 40k lore is written to ensure that everyone and their mother is bad.
If I'm allowed to complain a bit more; a lot of the pictures, particularly of the emperor, have pauldrons so large that they completely rob the one using it from every inch of periphery vision.