Can SM reproduce

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**camboyaz**

Well can SM have offspring?

**Kilkrazy**

It is pretty well defined in the fluff that they can't.

**camboyaz**

Kilkrazy wrote:It is pretty well defined in the fluff that they can't.

Why, are they neutured?

**Ailaros**

They can't even have regular human offspring?

If SMs are picked from the biggest and the best regular humans, I'm kind of surprised that they don't have an interest in them making more big, strong, regular humans (if in the least to improve the field of potential candidates for being made into marines).

I mean, obviously two marines mating wouldn't create a baby marine, but still...

---

Actually, you remember that seen in the original Conan the Barbarian movie where they keep Conan in a cage and bring him women to mate with so that their tribe can have more big, strong warriors like Conan. They don't let him out of the cage until he's impregnated all the women with future warriors.

I'd imagine they'd do something like that with space marines.

**camboyaz**

The only way two space marines could have kids is if the let girls become SM! I think the Inquistion might made some law to prohibit that...

**vodo40k**

I think they can, but they are probably so brainwashed they can instantly suppress any urges. Either that or they're sterile.

**camboyaz**

vodo40k wrote:I think they can, but they are probably so brainwashed they can instantly suppress any urges. Either that or they're sterile.

I dont think they would Brainwash them...

**vodo40k**

Brainwash, devout with faith same thing.

**Melissia**

No. Marines have altered genetics far beyond the human gene pool-- a second heart, spitting acid, their ribcage is basically a chestplate, and so on. Because there are no female Space Marines (that we know of anyway, there may be some mutated ones due to exposure to the warp, or in chaos marine armies, or just some unreported-- but we have no proof of their existence), that would mean that they cannot actually reproduce. They would be unlikely to produce a viable child through a human mother, similarly to how non-human mammals can't produce children through humans.

Whether or not they can have sex is an entirely different issue. Space Marines are not human genetically or biologically, and so they are unlikely to produce children with humans. There are no female Space Marines, and therefor they cannot reproduce that way. Effectively, this limits them to reproduction through the geneseed.

As a side note, this makes the Marines one giant gay joke waiting to happen, regarding "planting one's seed" in little boys to make them become Marines.

**Jimsolo**

Melissia is correct.

Ailaros, I cannot agree with your interpretation of the woman in the cage scene in Conan. I was always to believe that the woman was brought to Conan as a bribe for greater performance in the arena. (A reward, to keep him happy) I don't remember Mako-the-narrator mentioning anything about them using him as a breeding source.

And while Space Marines don't breed, I am fairly sure they have sex. I think any woman of normal human stock would end up seriously injured (or dead) but I also think that isn't going to stop Chaos marines from doing it. (Especially those Emperor's Children...)

**brainscan**

Jimsolo wrote:Melissia is correct.

Ailaros, I cannot agree with your interpretation of the woman in the cage scene in Conan. I was always to believe that the woman was brought to Conan as a bribe for greater performance in the arena. (A reward, to keep him happy) I don't remember Mako-the-narrator mentioning anything about them using him as a breeding source.

And while Space Marines don't breed, I am fairly sure they have sex. I think any woman of normal human stock would end up seriously injured (or dead) but I also think that isn't going to stop Chaos marines from doing it. (Especially those Emperor's Children...)

I thought he was made to breed prime slave stock. I seem to remember something from the film. Back to the original topic. I would expect that the SM would have all sexual urges become redundant by the there altered genetics.

**Velour_Fog**

Melissia wrote:
As a side note, this makes the Marines one giant gay joke waiting to happen

RAINBOW WARRIORS!!!111!!one!

**Shadowbrand**

Hey.

Space Wolves can have sex, ask Lukas the Trickster.

And from what I've been told the original Legion marines can have sex. I mean cmon you can't tell me the World Eaters or Emperors Children don't have sex. Even though the lad/lass wouldn't walk for a month.

**Henners91**

Don't Salamanders have kiddies?

**MekanobSamael**

SM would have no biological functions that are not combat-related. Breeding is no exception. That's why they have geneseed.

**oadie**

SM don't need sex, as they are made, not born. I'm sure there would be some crazy, Inquisition approved, vaguely Catholic-on-steroids guidelines for when and how sex should happen if it were necessary, but the SM recruit from the most capable human males, who then go through the gene therapy/surgeries that make a Space Marine. It's a much more controlled process, which the Imperial high mucky-mucks are all for, as well as removing a very powerful distraction that could prove a weakness for their most elite warriors.

I'm sure there are some examples of SM getting freaky in the fluff, but those are exceptions. When the background gets as expansive as 40K's is, you're bound to run into examples where writers conveniently forget the established "reality" in order to write a more interesting story.

**Lord-Loss**

I don't think normal SMs can have sex, and I don't think they would even if they could.

In Fulgrim it's mentioned that one of the Captain starts to be attracted to human females for the first time.

I think it was Julius.

**Henners91**

I do remember an interesting argument made by a Dakkaite who said the inability of SM to reproduce was integral to keeping them in control: SM are superior to humans in every way, they are only obligated to fight for us due to their memory of being humans themselves and the fact that they require humans in order to recruit from them.

If Marines could reproduce, then their chapters would become self-sufficient and their ties to humanity could easily be broken.

**reds8n**

Henners91 wrote:Don't Salamanders have kiddies?

No.

It's a long and well established part of the background that amrines cannot have children. Apart from their own genetic alterations they are also rendered sterile by some of the myriad of radiation treatments they undergo throughout their lives to mainatin the working order of their implants. If you go back far enough in fact the black carapace "smoothed" over the whole crotch area anyway, suggesting that their genitalia were originally removed. Seeing as how their armour and bodies work they wouldn't be needed.

Aside from that the psycho conditioning they go through removes the desire and, to an extent, the "need" to reproduce, the production of offspring and any "mate" not really being especially useful when trying to produce fanatical warriors monks. Lucius, as Slaanesh begins his seduction of him, does experience a mixed set of emotions at one point when confronted by a woman, but even then he's not quite sure what they actually entail or mean or are driving him to do.

In one of the early Ragnar stories he and his pack are working with a female and he has very vague memories of being attracted to women, but these feelings fade as the psycho conditioning takes hold. Remember that the normal marine recruitment age is about when puberty kicks in. The idea being very much -- see Watson's "Space Marine" novel -- that they take the sex drive and twist and distort it into a desire to kill and destroy.. it's all very Freudian really, especially in those days.

These days they have, understandably, moved away from delving not those areas so much, which is probably a wise move.

**Henners91**

Interesting, tbh I'd be filled with hate and bloodlust if someone took me gonads too.

**Kilkrazy**

They don't take them, you give them away before you know what they are for.

**Henners91**

On a related note: Do the SM have really high-pitched voices?

**ComputerGeek01**

I love this, you all think so one dimensionally that I can't help myself. The OPs question was "Can Space Marines Reproduce?" not can they have sex, there is a differance.

What is reproduction? When an organism passes on its genetic material to create a new organism. What is a gene-seed? A special organ implanted in an aspiring Space Marine that rewrites his gentic code so as to make him into a super soldier based on the primarch of a Legion. So just because this isn't the traditional Birds and the Bees method of reproduction doesn't mean that it's something else.

- Does this method require genetic material from the 'parent'? Yes, that is what a gene-seed is.

- Does this method result in a new organism that can then it self reproduce? Yes, a Space Marine is implanted with one gene seed and his body produces another.

- Is the new organism of the same species? Yes, the species being a Space Marine. The fact that they require a host from a differant species i.e. human only goes toward classifing them as parasitic.

The 'hole' in this argument, is that the new organism isn't a copy of the Primarch but rather a copy of the other Space Marines. But we are only told that the gene seeds were created from the Primarch and not that they were a host to them, so maybe they would be a third species?

**reds8n**

ComputerGeek01 wrote:I love this, you all think so one dimensionally that I can't help myself. The OPs question was "Can Space Marines Reproduce?"

No it wasn't. That's the thread title, the OP's question -- in the first post-- was

Well can SM have offspring?

Which , typically, is taken to refer to a child of a particular parentage.

Of course if one was to be deliberately obtuse there are ways a space marine can reproduce : the gene seed you mention, cloning or even magic all being viable options in the 40K setting. Hell Lucius manages tor eproduce by dying and then growing out of and subsuming his foes very body.

Of course all of these ways require, at the very least, considerable resources and assistance from others and are far more complicated that "the birds and bees" way.

**Kroothawk**

I wonder, if chess forums also have that much sex threads: "With the White Queen chasing after the Black King so much, what would their offspring look like?"

**Ailaros**

wait, wait. Space marines are MADE, not GROWN. There is nothing genetic about making a space marine. It's all about taking a regular human and implanting organs/irradiating/surgery/etc. Genetically, space marines are still just as human as before they were marines. Yes, they have a "gene seed", but that's a genetic copy of the special organs they throw in, not for the person as a whole.

As such, unless they are otherwise castrated, they could still reproduce regularly, it's just that their half that they're contributing would be regular human genes. A space marine and a woman having a baby would make just a regular human being. The thing is, though, that marines tend to get picked from large, aggressive people. As such, the imperium would clearly have an interest in having more large, aggressive people being born. This is a classic staple of eugenics - something which I can only assume that the imperium cares greatly about.

**Melissia**

Ailaros wrote:There is nothing genetic about making a space marine.

The Astartes implants change their biology and genetics. The occulobe makes genetic changes to the Marine's eye, for example.

**Ilkhan**

It's not as open and shut a case as some of these posts make it sound. Whether space marines are still human enough to be called, well, human, whether they're sterile or not, the limits of their psychoconditioning... all of these are complicated and ambiguous issues, and most of the fluff that directly addresses them is quite old. I'd say the best answer would be a resounding "We don't know" all around.

**Ailaros**

Ah, yes, but it changes THAT MARINE'S genetics in those particular parts of his body. The question is, though, does it also change the reproductive cells as well as the other ones in specific areas.

Perhaps all space marines become genetic chimeras due to their ordeal.

**Melissia**

Given the very strict controls on who can become a Marine, and the fact that so many of them are rejected and die before one is found? I doubt it.