Blood for the Blood God

About

"Blood for the Blood God", sometimes followed by “Skulls for the Skull Throne,” is a battlecry associated with the Chaos Space Marines faction in Warhammer 40k. Online, the phrase often appears in image macro captions and has inspired numerous variations using the phrasal template "X for the X God."

Origin

"Blood for the Blood God" a common battlecry amongst the Chaos Space Marines faction of the game. The faction worships one of the Four Gods of Chaos, Khorne. Khorne is the God of War, Murder, Anger, Hate, and general Bloodshed. His private realm in the Warp is said to be filled with rivers of blood and that he sits upon a throne of skulls, made from all who die in battle. Thus when a Chaos Space Marine kills someone, they cry "Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne!" The earliest explanation of the phrase online was posted in Khorne's Wikia page,^[1] written March 28th, 2006.

On July 3rd, 2008, a demotivational poster featuring the phrase was posted to gamereplays^[2] by Jean=A=Luc, likely marking the phrase's first appearance in a meme (shown below).

Spread

Over the following years, the phrase began appearing in various meme templates referencing Warhammer 40k, including Rage Comics and Insanity Wolf (shown below) before eventually moving into other fandoms.

The phrase has appeared in various anime and My Little Pony image macros as well. It also grew into a popular snowclone on Reddit with the format "(X) for the (X) God." Two threads have been posted to /r/OutOftheLoop about the phrase, one posted November 24th, 2013^[3] and another posted May 8th, 2017.^[4] In June of 2014, the Twitter account @godtributes^[5] devoted to posting variations of the snowclone launched, gaining over 19,300 followers.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References