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DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Honestly, do marines or Custodes even need a sex? I am not 100% sure about this but I’m guessing marines don’t go around having sex or anything

If Marines were presented as sexless transhuman killing machines, that'd be one thing. But they aren't.

Once Marneus Calgar stopped being some guy sitting on a toilet all lore became malleable.

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Honestly, do marines or Custodes even need a sex? I am not 100% sure about this but I’m guessing marines don’t go around having sex or anything

Far as I recall their whole sex drive is killed off during the mutations they undergo to become a Marine.

The issue is that culturally we use masculine language as a default. If we truly used neutral language to describe things - they etc, then sure, there would actually be a case for considering them sexless.

But it comes across overwhelmingly male, and that generates a push to even things out.

Even the term 'guys' is not as gender neutral as people like to claim it is - I've never heard a straight man say they sleep with guys.


So, until language embraces truly gender neutral pronouns in conversation, we will still have the push pull over representation, even in supposedly neutral contexts.

I honestly don’t care. I have always been a big fan of seeing yourself in your armies. I’ve never not played someone because they had female heads on their Astartes or modeled their miniatures in whatever way. They are your plastic toy soldiers. Not mine. Do what you want.

With that being said. I loved the idea of a bunch of regular people in power armor. Kinda like the Imperial Guard but with power armor and Bolters. Like I said I’m a big fan of putting yourself in your army, I’m a man so I had the idea of using sisters of battle rules and miniatures and converted most, not all of the miniatures being male. I tried to have a healthy balance. I ended up using sisters miniatures and/or Van Saar miniatures with conversions. They actually looked kinda cool. I ended up completing 1000 points of this army. I went to play with them at a GW in Maryland and was told I couldn’t use the army because I could offend someone.

Again, use whatever you want. Model your miniatures whatever way you want. They are your toys not mine. We should respect everyone and just have fun with our plastic toy soldiers. It’s just annoying bringing real world politics into the setting. Enjoy the hobby, respect everyone and have fun.

Oh and if you want to see some miniatures of my “Misters of Battle” hit me up. I have no problem sharing my conversions. I still have some pictures of them.

 BertBert wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
They're designed to be flexible so anyone can see themselves as the heroes of the setting. When they were created "anyone" meant boys. These days there's no reason it shouldn't mean "everyone".

I'll never understand this need for self-insertion, but apparently that's the first thing everyone cares about these days.

Because you get to see yourself in everything already.

 kodos wrote:
I guess the setting itself is not very appealing to the masses and without a major change and retcon it won't be

I doubt that having female killers that tramble on civilians in their way to fight everyone who doubt the regime is right will attract more female players

Boy I wish GW actually leaned into Space marines being fascist murder troops and the imperium being the awful hellstate its supposed to be more, but GW sure don't/

If you want Marines to be all boys cause misogyny, that's cool. If you make it explicit and go "Yeah, the emperor was a gakky bronze age warlord, of course he hated women", but we both know GW never will

 Grimskul wrote:

 kodos wrote:
I guess the setting itself is not very appealing to the masses and without a major change and retcon it won't be

Basically this and I don't think that it should pander to the mythical idea of a "modern audience" that is all inclusive because changing itself to appeal to everyone is an exercise in futility. It's a niche hobby and while it's become more mainstream than it was in the past, it fundamentally is still largely dominated by guys because the baseline setting and the actually hobby itself trends towards a male audience (and a very specific one at that as well) to begin with and you can't force girls into joining just to achieve some abitrary idea of gender parity or diversity. Just like how the cosmestics and fashion industry will be dominated by women, and I don't think you should force changes in products to appeal to men, I think there's fundamentally nothing wrong with having a skew to a particular demographic. Are you going to start hating on how kids are the primary focus for Paw Patrol and that adults are being excluded in that franchise due to ageism? While we shouldn't actively bar women from joining, like Overread said, sweeping changes to the lore are not going to the Panacea you're looking for (and in fact, can do the opposite and dilute the identity of the actual setting if you go gung ho with more and more retcons) and any weird sexist/mysognist stuff is really tied to the local community that should be addressed there, GW isn't going to be able (nor should they) police people's behaviours and you can find arseholes in any hobby, it feels like that particular fear is just a shield to push changes you guys want.

Its dominated by guys because plenty guys think that girls have such different brains that they can't have fun playing with toy soldiers.

And male spaces tend to be just fething gross to women. Lot of game shops in the world are not safe for ladies.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
GW is not a company ran by robots. its designers are still human, its sculptors are still human, its writers are still humans. each of these are human beings with their own thoughts and feelings on a wide variety of subjects and those thoughts and opinions will bleed into the game in myriad ways

if i had to guess, the way this short story came about was not some GW accountant circling "woke" on a whiteboard to a chorus of cheers. it was probably one writer, or a small group of writers, who wanted to introduce female custodians because they thought it would be cool, who then asked higher ups "hey is this okay?" and got an answer ranging from "sure, whatever" to "absolutely". this is still just a short story in a codex. if they wanted Female Custodians Exist Now to be a major marketing point for this codex, they might have written a warcom article in advance about it, or had a female custodian on the cover, or something more. as-is, this feels like a small effort because someone personally wanted it to exist

Indeed the last time we know about a writer wanting to add femstodes, he was told no he couldn't by the corporate suits.

 insaniak wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 MalusCalibur wrote:
Marines, and Custodes, are men. There is an in-universe reason for this (incompatibility with the various gene implants etc) and a logical one (if you're going to make super-soldiers, you're going to start with the physically stronger gender template). That's all that should matter - showing no respect to the source material in order to cater to modern identity politics is shallow pandering at best.

There has never been any background that states custodes genetic engineering is antigirl. THey stated that marine geneseed is locked to men (which is itself a very far fetched concept), but have never said the same for custodes.

All custodes start as the sons of nobles and 'custodes engineering is only compatible with men' are two entirely different things.

Even with marines, the 'incompatibility' issue only exists because in Citadel's early days mixed blister packs with women in them didn't sell well. Marines being only men is in itself a retcon.

And the 'physically stronger' argument goes straight out the window in a game setting where women have the exact same physical profile as men.

Brickfix wrote:
I think it great that a writer now has the opportunity to show a masculine brotherhood in Marines and a different bond in custodes

I can't help but think that a lot of the world's problem will be solved when people stop seeing a need to differentiate between bonds of 'masculine brotherhood' and any other type of close friendship.

But that aside, writers will still be able to do that when GW do eventually add female space marines, because male space marines will still exist.

Priestley also has had some very "Girls have cooties" Tier takes as well.

 Ahtman wrote:
As an Ork I don't care what giblets you have it's all getting chopped. You know, for fun.

Orks are not, in fact, genderless. They are sexless, but they are all masc.

Orks need to reproduce by spores, the more time they would spend having sex would be less time they could have to waaagh

Being able to reproduce asexually by just producing spores doesn't mean that biologically you lack sex. Sex in animals is related to the gametes you produce, big female, small male, some insects can produce both thus hermafroditism. Plants can use meiosis in some cases to produce copies of itself but they are still male/female/both so if we link Orks to fungi that's probably how they reproduce.

What Orks definetly don't have is gender, because that's a human thing that includes social, psychological, cultural, etc... aspects of being a man or a woman.

M.

Edit: Yes, we human players can assign a gender to Orks, but that's on us, not necessarily how Orks see themselves in the lore.

 Miguelsan wrote:
Being able to reproduce asexually by just producing spores doesn't mean that biologically you lack sex. Sex in animals is related to the gametes you produce, big female, small male, some insects can produce both thus hermafroditism. Plants can use meiosis in some cases to produce copies of itself but they are still male/female/both so if we link Orks to fungi that's probably how they reproduce.

What Orks definetly don't have is gender, because that's a human thing that includes social, psychological, cultural, etc... aspects of being a man or a woman.

M.

Edit: Yes, we human players can assign a gender to Orks, but that's on us, not necessarily how Orks see themselves in the lore.

Orks absolutely have a gender because they were written and made by humans that place human gendered concepts into them. Orks are masc. There's no serious take where they aren't masc.

TYRANIDS are largely genderless.

That might be how you see them, I see them akin to ants, bees, or termites so a majority sterile females, along with the fertile ones, but that's because I, a human, place human gendered views on them.

M.

 Miguelsan wrote:
That might be how you see them, I see them akin to ants, bees, or termites so a majority sterile females, along with the fertile ones, but that's because I, a human, place human gendered views on them.

M.

Suuure you do.

They are literally called the boyz. In setting.

My mistake, I was answering at the nid being genderless part, not the Orks. Still boyz is how we human players call them, do you speak Ork? Do even orks speak gothic in the setting? It's the same convenience used in the movies, for ease of understanding we get samurai speaking English, or actors using Russian accents for KGB officers.
So boyz is not how they call themselves in the setting, it's how GW authors using human PoV including gender wrote them in so we human players can understand something familiar to us rather than an incoherent string of characters on a page related to even weirder concepts born out of an ork mind.

M.

stratigo wrote:

 Miguelsan wrote:
That might be how you see them, I see them akin to ants, bees, or termites so a majority sterile females, along with the fertile ones, but that's because I, a human, place human gendered views on them.

M.

Suuure you do.

They are literally called the boyz. In setting.

I'm pretty sure Miguelsan was referring to Tyranids.

stratigo wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
As an Ork I don't care what giblets you have it's all getting chopped. You know, for fun.

Orks are not, in fact, genderless. They are sexless, but they are all masc.

I said nothing about our gender, only that we don't care about your sex: you're all getting krumped either way. Whether humies think we're masculine or feminine means nothing to us.

 Ahtman wrote:

stratigo wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
As an Ork I don't care what giblets you have it's all getting chopped. You know, for fun.

Orks are not, in fact, genderless. They are sexless, but they are all masc.

I said nothing about our gender, only that we don't care about your sex: you're all getting krumped either way. Whether humies think we're masculine or feminine means nothing to us.

This thermian stuff is deeply uninteresting. But orks clearly consider themselves male. They use he/him pronouns and consider themselves boyz. That's gendered language.

this is simply because the imperial narrator writing down what Orks say is unreliable and changed it to fit the imperial norms

in reality, Orks use she/they and call themselves gyrlz

Oh, never thought it was that!

M.

 kodos wrote:
this is simply because the imperial narrator writing down what Orks say is unreliable and changed it to fit the imperial norms

in reality, Orks use she/they and call themselves gyrlz

Lot of dogs perking their ears up at this one

 kodos wrote:
this is simply because the imperial narrator writing down what Orks say is unreliable and changed it to fit the imperial norms

in reality, Orks use she/they and call themselves gyrlz

Orks just fought Space Marines for Millenia and like to imitate them. They don't know there are different kinds of humans because they also all look the same. (According to some dakkanauts the Imperial guard must feature less than 10% females so even if Orks fought other human factions than Space Marines they still wouldn't know of different genders, following that logic. )

 Miguelsan wrote:
My mistake, I was answering at the nid being genderless part, not the Orks. Still boyz is how we human players call them, do you speak Ork? Do even orks speak gothic in the setting? It's the same convenience used in the movies, for ease of understanding we get samurai speaking English, or actors using Russian accents for KGB officers.
So boyz is not how they call themselves in the setting, it's how GW authors using human PoV including gender wrote them in so we human players can understand something familiar to us rather than an incoherent string of characters on a page related to even weirder concepts born out of an ork mind.

M.

It doesn't matter. Orcs are not real. The text and the models representing them are real, how they're presented and perceived is real. And they come across as unambiguously male, and are perceived as such. Thus they're an all male faction from representation perspective.

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 MalusCalibur wrote:
Marines, and Custodes, are men. There is an in-universe reason for this (incompatibility with the various gene implants etc) and a logical one (if you're going to make super-soldiers, you're going to start with the physically stronger gender template). That's all that should matter - showing no respect to the source material in order to cater to modern identity politics is shallow pandering at best.

"women are weaker" is such an unscientific excuse. look at any number of female strongmen, female martial artists, female sports players. people are so against the idea of strong women that female athletes are being forced onto hormone replacement therapy because they exceed the idea of what men expect of them. biology does not state that women are fundamentally weaker than men, because human biology really doesn't differentiate between men and women all that much (and just look at intersex people for how much this strict sexual binary doesn't even work as a framework). if we're turning to biology to make an argument, then we can look at decades of hormone science to see that the barrier between male and female bodies is remarkably thing and incredibly malleable

Also this is trying to apply logic to a universe 38k years in the future, for where we all know the physical differences have become negligible at best and don’t even apply

Wow this is so fundamentaly wrong from a scientific point of view I just don't know what to say(I say that as evolutionary biologist). The biological and psychological difference between sexes is huge that they are practicly another species. Diseases affect the sexes differently and male and female bodies react differently to medcine. I could go on with similar examples. Hormones do not define sex(or chromosomes). Hormone therapy just feths up your body and most europeen countries have started banning it at least for non adults.And you don't seem to understand what intersex means it is not what you seem to think it is. They always have a sex.
I would recomend some reading before making some statements on what is scientific and what is unscientific.

Anon052 wrote:


Wow this is so fundamentaly wrong from a scientific point of view I just don't know what to say(I say that as evolutionary biologist). The biological and psychological difference between sexes is huge that they are practicly another species. Diseases affect the sexes differently and male and female bodies react differently to medcine. I could go on with similar examples. Hormones do not define sex(or chromosomes). Hormone therapy just feths up your body and most europeen countries have started banning it at least for non adults.And you don't seem to understand what intersex means it is not what you seem to think it is. They always have a sex.
I would recomend some reading before making some statements on what is scientific and what is unscientific.

None of this is relevant to a game setting where men and women are functionally identical.

 insaniak wrote:

Anon052 wrote:


Wow this is so fundamentaly wrong from a scientific point of view I just don't know what to say(I say that as evolutionary biologist). The biological and psychological difference between sexes is huge that they are practicly another species. Diseases affect the sexes differently and male and female bodies react differently to medcine. I could go on with similar examples. Hormones do not define sex(or chromosomes). Hormone therapy just feths up your body and most europeen countries have started banning it at least for non adults.And you don't seem to understand what intersex means it is not what you seem to think it is. They always have a sex.
I would recomend some reading before making some statements on what is scientific and what is unscientific.

None of this is relevant to a game setting where men and women are functionally identical.

Skimming over the discussion so far, is this based purely on in-game stats?

If so that's also ignoring a whole slew of suspension of disbelief type moments, such as when suddenly (to use extremes) an untrained human off the street (ala cultist) is potentially functionally identical to a steroid and hormone grown skitarii with mechanical limbs. I think we can all assume that when you explode the very linear base scaling of the stats in the game, that's a very one sided fight in reality, hence the suspension of disbelief isn't a strong enough metric to prove whether biological differences in a story/setting/fictional work are relevant to anything.

I guess if we're honest it's all down to integrity of the setting in any regard, whether the Imperium maintains gender divides in some factions due to ignorance from the Imperium and that's a feature of the setting, whether there's some sci-fi hand-wavey reason for it, or possibly if it's the authors ignorance which can be innocent or not.

All for gender representation where it doesn't blow up the entire setting, not everything is fair and equal in the Imperium and sometimes they don't know what they can/can't do in-setting. As such I'm fine with female custodians, that makes sense to me as Emps will have wanted any exceptional people he can find. Stuff like marines, sisters of battle and sisters of silence get a bit iffy, because their entire identity is partly based around the anachronistic beliefs of their organisations. But if it flies for one faction, it does for all at that point imo.

With regards peoples kits or personal army fluff, yeah whatever. If you want female space marines, go for it, do some cool conversions and it can be a fun game. I can acknowledge and appreciate that persons passion and beliefs even if that doesn't fit my perspective on the in-universe fluff.

The oddity for me has always been that Custodes were only selected from the nobility.

 Souleater wrote:
The oddity for me has always been that Custodes were only selected from the nobility.

Makes perfect sense to me. 40K has loads of ancient time tropes so the Custodes being drawn from the Nobility fits right into the way many ancient armies would have their upper ranks populated almost exclusively by the upper classes of the day. Here you have the best of the best, so of course they'd only select from the best of stock of the Nobility. Not the common dregs of the population for the rank and file .

 Souleater wrote:
The oddity for me has always been that Custodes were only selected from the nobility.

Makes sense with their pompous superior shinyness.

But yeah, I always liked marines better, at least they have an option of being gritty.

The fact that I don't really like the custodes that much in the first place dampens my joy about female custodes a bit. I will never do a full army of them, and IIRC we currently have no proper ally rules to include just a squad or two in a bigger force.

Sometimes I wonder what these forums would have looked like when GW went from "here's how to make your own tank with a tin can and some glue" to "here's a big expensive solid plastic tank kit to build at home; and an even more expensive resin one"

Would we have had fights over authentic tank creation; or on how GW is destroying the hobby of creation for greed?



Sometimes I think some people look way way too far into things

those forums pointed out that these people are just haters who don't like the hobby and just want GW to fail and that a true fan is going to support the company no matter what so they can grow and deliver more of models people like

would have been more entertaining to see how todays social media would have reacted to the retcons of 4th Edition or 7th Edi codex writing

Bubbalicious wrote:
REMOVED

Stop with this conspiracy stuff. This is what got the thread closed before, so take it elsewhere

stratigo wrote:
Because you get to see yourself in everything already.

I absolutely don't and never have. It's not helpful to just assume everyone to be a white man because they don't agree with your presuppositions. Self-insertion was relevant up until when I was about 11 years old, and even then I could be a ninja turtle, a velociraptor or whatever was the current thing. After that, I learned to appreciate characters and stories for what they are, not for how well they represent my arbitrary phenotype and cultural heritage. Then again, I was well cared and provided for, so maybe that's the reason I'm no longer bound by those infantile notions. I can see people needing this if they have lacked proper attention and care in their lives and, in those cases, they have my deepest sympathies.