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Subject line says it all. Any thoughts?

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/409476.page

Because it's impossible to tell gender from what is clearly meant to represent a skeleton.
Genitals aren't made of bone, you see.

They are in the form of skellitons. How could you tell?

Who said there are no female Necrons?

(<------------)

Long story short, likely 50% ish of Necrons are female. Female robot skelitons.

You perhaps want robot skelliton breasts?

Well, I'm just guessing here, but it could be that it'd require a whole new "look" to be made (different torsos etc.), or that the army doesn't require genders to multiply- so it'd be unnecessary to add females, plus war is normally considered to be a masculine thing.

shrike wrote:Well, I'm just guessing here, but it could be that it'd require a whole new "look" to be made (different torsos etc.), or that the army doesn't require genders to multiply- so it'd be unnecessary to add females, plus war is normally considered to be a masculine thing.

Of course it doesn't require sexes to multiply, it's a race of undying machines.
Again, it comes down to the fact that there probably are Necrons that were once female - back when they had a biological body.
As their bodies now resemble their skeletons, and skeletons are very difficult to assign gender to, this is why there appear to be no gender differences.
In reality, it'd be more accurate to say the Necrons looked asexual than male.

Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Because it's impossible to tell gender from what is clearly meant to represent a skeleton.
Genitals aren't made of bone, you see.

Glad this post came up quickly, because it's right.

shrike wrote:Well, I'm just guessing here, but it could be that it'd require a whole new "look" to be made (different torsos etc.), or that the army doesn't require genders to multiply- so it'd be unnecessary to add females, plus war is normally considered to be a masculine thing.

That's one thing I've been wondering, though. How do Necrons multiply? According to the fluff, the robots are infused with souls from the Necrontyr. Since there are no more Necrontyr, does that mean that the current number of Necrons is all there is, and that the number can only go down? Yeah it would go down slowly, Necrons being able to repair themselves and all, but there are times when your chassis gets a meltagun to the face and you can't regenerate. Or, like how it's stated in the Res Protocall rules, Necrons who are left behind self-destruct.

Even assuming that the technology is still functional to make more Necron bodies/implant souls in there, metal skeletons can't reproduce. And there's nothing in the lore about the Necrons taking captives to create more of them.

Robots building robots? I couldn't possibly imagine similarities between Necrons and Skynet! Makes more sense than robots grinding each others' gears to give birth to baby robot skeletons.

I haven't read all the new Necron fluff, but that's how I'm assuming they make more. They've got resurrection ships so they could just indefinitely repair themselves, and there are supposed to be billions of them everywhere anyway.

They don't. They are a doomed and dying race. That is the consequence of their deal with the devil.

Oh, they will die slowly, but they will eventually die. And those that don't succumb to destruction or disrepair are doomed to slowly succumb to insanity.

That is their curse.

riplikash wrote:They don't. They are a doomed and dying race. That is the consequence of their deal with the devil.

Oh, they will die slowly, but they will eventually die. And those that don't succumb to destruction or disrepair are doomed to slowly succumb to insanity.

That is their curse.

Cool, was actually curious about that. Makes more sense than my theories

And they aren't infused with the 'souls' of the Necrontyr. Their souls are gone, devoured or lost, depending on your interpretation. Their conciousness was transferred, but their soul was lost. They have no future as a species. They can neither reproduce, nor continue on in any spiritual sense by ascending from their mortal coil, re-incarnating, or moving on to some sort of after life.. They are the damned.

That's the most 40k fluff ever.

riplikash wrote:And they aren't infused with the 'souls' of the Necrontyr. Their souls are gone, devoured or lost, depending on your interpretation. Their conciousness was transferred, but their soul was lost. They have no future as a species. They can neither reproduce, nor continue on in any spiritual sense by ascending from their mortal coil, re-incarnating, or moving on to some sort of after life.. They are the damned.

Actually, their souls were lost, not devoured. The C'tan can only interact with things in the Materium, and a soul is not material, if y'catch my meaning.

riplikash wrote:And they aren't infused with the 'souls' of the Necrontyr. Their souls are gone, devoured or lost, depending on your interpretation. Their conciousness was transferred, but their soul was lost. They have no future as a species. They can neither reproduce, nor continue on in any spiritual sense by ascending from their mortal coil, re-incarnating, or moving on to some sort of after life.. They are the damned.

Well now we're getting into all that philosophosophy. What is a soul, anyways? Hehehe.


But yeah, thanks for clearing that up. Been wondering about that. Woulda been cooler, in my opinion, for GW to go more into that in the codex fluff. But what we got is awesome either way, so I'm not complaining :p

I know the theory, yes, but we just don't know anymore. That was definitely true in the old codex. The new codex hints at...different possibilities. We really don't know much about the C'Tans nature anymore, or even where they really come from. The new codex strongly hints that they are not the 'star vampires' we previously thought they were, and that the merely presented themselves as such to trick the Necrontyr. They are actually something darker and more sinister, cast down from whatever they once were by the Old Ones, desperately searching for a way to strike back against them.

It is now very possible that they did in fact devour the souls of the Necrontyr (the new codex hints at such, though it doesn't say it outright), or perhaps just the destruction of those souls.

What we can be fairly certain of is:
a) they were not the 'innocent' star vampires we once thought they were
b) they tricked the necrontyr into thinking they were
c) the necrontyr had souls when they entered the flesh forges, or whatever they are called
d) the C'Tan swarmed around them, devouring 'something'
e) after the transformation the Necrons souls were gone, and the C'Tan had gained tremendous cosmic power
c) the C'Tan are not as ignorant or powerless concerning the warp as was once thought, as demonstrated by their knowledge of accessing the webway

To me, at least, this indicates somehow the Necrons souls were used to power the C'Tan. Perhaps by devouring it, perhaps by destroying it, it is hard to say.

But personally I find it hard to believe they gained godlike power just by devouring the electric signals of the Necrontyr's bodies. The old fluff let us believe they just thought it tasted great and it was addictive. The new fluff indicates they knew exactly what they were getting, a source of incredible power.

The only difference between a female robot skeleton and a male robot skeleton would be a slightly wider pelvis on the female, and only then in they even conserved bone structure when the transformed. Since the warriors were likely mass produced though, that wouldn't have happened.

Durza wrote:The only difference between a female robot skeleton and a male robot skeleton would be a slightly wider pelvis on the female, and only then in they even conserved bone structure when the transformed. Since the warriors were likely mass produced though, that wouldn't have happened.

And even that is only on average, and only noticably after childbirth.

VarguardObrien wrote:

Even assuming that the technology is still functional to make more Necron bodies/implant souls in there, metal skeletons can't reproduce. And there's nothing in the lore about the Necrons taking captives to create more of them.

And that is why I don't like the new fluff. In the old fluff the necrons do want to make everyone into machines. Right now, they don't want to do that, and instead try to find ways of turning themselves organic (even if faced with their own destruction).

Throatpunch wrote:Subject line says it all. Any thoughts?

Because they are robots...

Necrons aren't humans, so we know absolutely nothing about how their skeletal structure compares to ours (almost all non-human mammals have an actual bone in the penis).

And, Necrons aren't humans, so our definition of "male" and "female" doesn't apply to them at all. They could have more than 2 sexes, they could all be our equivalent of hermaphrodite, or they could reproduce by means we can't even recognize.


For all we know, there's no such thing as a female necron. Or, maybe all necrons models are female.

Personally I much prefer it to the old fluff. I find it much deeper than "kill/convert everything". Though I don't think 'make everyone into machines' was EVER their goal. They engineered the pariah gene in humanity to create pariah Necrons, but beyond that I think their goal was just to harvest life for the C'Tan.

I love the duality of the Necrons in the new fluff. At the peak of their evolution, but damned to stagnancy. Brilliant, logical intellects, plagued by a slow descent into insanity they don't even realize is happening. Tragic victims of their own 'gods', monstrous villians enslaving the minds of their own people. The most advanced tech in the universe, with the most stagnant, hide bound society. A cyborg race that cast off it's inferior mortal forms, so terrified of losing what is left of their forms that only the most insane are willing to alter themselves. Fearless and jubilant in their immortality, terrified of losing what little mortality they have left.

The duality is repeated over and over in the new codex, subtle but consistent, painting a picture of a race that has gained everything, and lost everything. I love it, and for me at least, it is a huge improvement over robot zombies that kill everything.

riplikash wrote:Personally I much prefer it to the old fluff. I find it much deeper than "kill/convert everything". Though I don't think 'make everyone into machines' was EVER their goal. They engineered the pariah gene in humanity to create pariah Necrons, but beyond that I think their goal was just to harvest life for the C'Tan.

I love the duality of the Necrons in the new fluff. At the peak of their evolution, but damned to stagnancy. Brilliant, logical intellects, plagued by a slow descent into insanity they don't even realize is happening. Tragic victims of their own 'gods', monstrous villians enslaving the minds of their own people. The most advanced tech in the universe, with the most stagnant, hide bound society. A cyborg race that cast off it's inferior mortal forms, so terrified of losing what is left of their forms that only the most insane are willing to alter themselves. Fearless and jubilant in their immortality, terrified of losing what little mortality they have left.

The duality is repeated over and over in the new codex, subtle but consistent, painting a picture of a race that has gained everything, and lost everything. I love it, and for me at least, it is a huge improvement over robot zombies that kill everything.

You do have to admit though, the fact that they are now finite and unable to replace losses does lower their threat level quite a bit.

CthuluIsSpy wrote:
You do have to admit though, the fact that they are now finite and unable to replace losses does lower their threat level quite a bit.

Over the long haul, yes, but not in any meaningful way to anyone currently alive. They are an order of magnitude harder to take down than the average human, seem to win the vast majority of their battles, and recover the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time. And they likely outnumber humanity significantly (their codex mentions there being 'millions' of tomb worlds, compared to the Imperiums 'million' worlds).

I would say the fact they they may die out over the next hundred million years (conjecture based on their casualties during the past 60 million being implied to be unusually high due to their vulnerability but not significantly crippling them as a race) does little to make them less threatening to anyone alive in the Imperium today.

riplikash wrote:

CthuluIsSpy wrote:
You do have to admit though, the fact that they are now finite and unable to replace losses does lower their threat level quite a bit.

Over the long haul, yes, but not in any meaningful way to anyone currently alive. They are an order of magnitude harder to take down than the average human, seem to win the vast majority of their battles, and recover the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time. And they likely outnumber humanity significantly (their codex mentions there being 'millions' of tomb worlds, compared to the Imperiums 'million' worlds).

I would say the fact they they may die out over the next hundred million years (conjecture based on their casualties during the past 60 million being implied to be unusually high due to their vulnerability but not significantly crippling them as a race) does little to make them less threatening to anyone alive in the Imperium today.

Alright, you have a point there.

Really not trying to be flippant or sarcastic, but that is honestly one of the only times on dakka (or, really, the internet) someone I was disagreeing with, who felt I had made a good counter argument has bothered to acknowledge the fact rather than ignore it, throw up straw-men, or just disappeared from the discussion.

So thank you. It makes these discussions much more enjoyable. +2 internets to you, sir.

Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Because it's impossible to tell gender from what is clearly meant to represent a skeleton.
Genitals aren't made of bone, you see.

Really? Because based just on their pelvis, I had assumed all Necron were female.

SJ

*note: you can tell gender base on skeletal shape and size of specific bones. Basic anatomy.

Just a quick thought. The c'tan took the form of the necrontyrs old legends and gods. The siren is very clearly described as a "female" c'tan. If her body was inspired by the necrontyr legends it is safe to assume that they have a legend about a female god/necrontyr. Which they would only have if they had females of their species.

That said breasts are not part of the skeleton. lumps of meat no matter how attractive would look out of place. However you could probably get away with some female necron lord (there is nothing saying females could or could not become part of the ruling caste) who like a lot of other necrons longs for her old body.

I actually use High Queen Khalida as a proxy for a lord since I needed one after the codex came out. I am sure with some conversion work you could make her look the part. (replace her head and give her a necron staff for example)